Today, Explained - The Senate trial begins

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Vox's Andrew Prokop explains everything you need to know as President Trump's Senate impeachment trial gets underway. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Ukraine. Ukraine Explained. It's Ukraine Explained. Will all senators now stand or remain standing and raise their right hand? Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, President of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws? So help you God. Amen.

The clerk will call the names. Andrew Prokop, Politics Vox. The president got impeached in late December. It is now late January and his trial finally begins today in earnest. What happened in the interim? So we had a bit of a standoff. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after the House passed the impeachment articles, she held them up and did not send them to the Senate right away. I was not prepared to put the managers and that bill yet because we don't know the arena that we are in.

Frankly, I don't care what the Republicans say. In the meantime, former National Security Advisor John Bolton announced that he would be willing to testify in the Senate trial if he was subpoenaed, which was kind of surprising. Then the Government Accountability Office announced that the White House had violated federal law by withholding the hundreds of millions of dollars in money for Ukraine because Congress had passed it into law and Trump had no legal authority to hold it up. Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law. That's notable of course because Republicans, their defense has been this is just a policy disagreement and that's in the president's purview.

And then this guy named Lev Parnas, a close associate of Rudy Giuliani's and his fixer in the Ukraine caper, essentially, started to talk a lot. And he handed over a trove of documents to the impeachment investigators in the House. And he did big TV interviews with Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper. I went from being a top donor, from being at all the events where we would just socialize, to becoming a close friend of Rudy Giuliani's, to eventually becoming his ally and his asset on the ground in Ukraine. Let's talk about a few of these bigger moments. What exactly was Speaker Pelosi's plan and how did it work out? So once the House had passed the impeachment articles, meaning that Trump was impeached, Pelosi had the idea that the leverage in the situation now shifted.

She thought that what Trump wanted now was a from happening, she would gain potentially greater negotiating leverage to help determine the rules for the trial and whether witnesses could be called or at least would have a high ground in a public opinion standoff or that sort of thing. Or some said would buy more time for new witnesses to come forward or so on. So she announced that she wasn't going to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. And Trump was indeed very angry about this. He sent a lot of angry tweets about this. Crazy Nancy Pelosi should spend more time in her decaying city and less time on the impeachment hoax. But what happened was that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, didn't budge.

He would not negotiate with Democrats over the witness issue. And he locked down the votes of enough Republican senators in his conference to be able to do what he needed to do, which is to pass a plan for the first phase of the Senate trial and how it will work. That will happen today. So Pelosi lost. This gamble did not pay off.

There will not be witnesses in the Senate trial. That's not actually so clear. So Pelosi did not succeed in winning preemptive concessions from McConnell into how the trial will be set up. But the witness issue remains conspicuously unresolved. Democrats' demand was to agree to call four witnesses up front, including John Bolton. But McConnell's position was a bit more subtle. He said that he does not want the Senate to make a decision on witnesses one way or the other until after the trial begins,

until after there are opening arguments and a period of questioning. His stance is that this is how it was done for Bill Clinton's impeachment trial in 1999, so it makes sense to do it now. Democrats have cried foul because back then pretty much every witness of relevance to the Monica Lewinsky slash Ken Starr investigation had already been questioned. And in the Trump impeachment inquiry, there were several witnesses who refused to testify or who the Trump administration ordered not to testify. So Democrats say it's a different situation right now. The perfect place for them to testify is in the Senate, so they should do it. And the holdup right now is that some of the more independent-minded or moderate Senate Republicans are not yet ready to agree to no witnesses. So McConnell is hoping that once the trial kicks off, we go through a few days of this,

everyone kind of gets bored and tired of this, and then they agree to just throw in the towel, cut things off, and go to a verdict. Let's talk about the president's defense for a moment here. He sort of finalized his legal team last week. Who's on it? Any familiar names? Oh, yeah. So there is, in addition to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who sent the infamous letter saying there would be no cooperation with the impeachment inquiry to Congress. There's also Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, who's been representing him since the Mueller investigation and a few more staffers in the White House counsel's office.

But the big names were the outside picks. And it's unclear what capacity exactly they'll be in or how much of a role they'll have on Trump's team. But they are on Trump's team. And they include Ken Starr, who famously was the independent counsel whose investigation led to Bill Clinton's impeachment. He will now be arguing that Donald Trump should not be removed from office. President Trump has not committed any crimes whatsoever. This has been an impeachment in search of a label. How did Monica Lewinsky react to that selection?

She tweeted, this is definitely an are you fucking kidding me kind of day. Who else is on Team Trump? Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr in the independent counsel role. And Alan Dershowitz, who has been defending Trump a lot on TV. The critical point is that obstruction of Congress and abuse of power are clearly not within what the framers intended. And I will lay out that argument quite clearly with sources. And I'm sure my other members of the Trump team will do the same. You know, he's a Harvard law professor, defended O.J. Simpson.

He defended Jeffrey Epstein and his name has come up in the Epstein scandal. So I think Trump wanted a really big-name celebrity lawyer on his team, and that's why he picked Dershowitz. So on the other side of this, we have the impeachment managers whom Nancy Pelosi picked last week. Who did she end up picking? So she picked seven members of the House of Representatives. The leader of the team is Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Jerry Nadler, chair of House Judiciary. Chair Zoe Lofgren, chair of the House Committee on House Administration.

Chair Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Congresswoman Val Demings of Florida. Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia of Texas. Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. And it's a set of members who are pretty close to leadership, who are a little more restrained in their style, not liberal partisan bomb throwers necessarily. I'm very proud and honored that these seven members, distinguished members, have accepted this serious responsibility. Before we get to Lev Parnas and all the things he spilled on national TV last week, I wonder, you know, this doesn't happen very often. You made some

parallels to the Clinton impeachment trial. Is there anything else here that's sort of exceptional, extraordinary about the way this will proceed in the next few days and weeks? So McConnell's plan, as I mentioned, is to try and get this thing over with as quickly as possible. Initially, he proposed that each side would get 24 hours split over just two days, which would imply two 12-hour days. And there was a lot of outrage and pushback. So today he announced that there would be a last-minute change and the 24 hours of floor time for each side would be split over a maximum of three days. Still, McConnell is trying, it seems, to move this thing along as quickly as he can to try and get Trump

acquitted by the time of his State of the Union address, which is two weeks from today. Madam Speaker, the President of the United States. More with Andrew in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained,

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Andrew Prokop, let's talk about Lev Parnas. He's been on TV a bunch lately. Four and a half million Americans tuned in to watch Lev Parnas go face-to-face with Rachel Maddow. Just part of a media blitz to get this story out. Remind the folks at decades until he somehow came into a lot of money and started donating it

to Republicans in the last few years and Trump's super PAC and eventually paid $500,000 to Rudy Giuliani to get into his inner circle. And then Parnas and Giuliani became essentially joined at the hip. And Parnas had another guy who was very close to Igor Fruman, who he always went around with Giuliani with. And Parnas and Fruman essentially opened Joe and Hunter Biden and supposed Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election to hurt Donald Trump and other matters. And essentially these accusations they've been peddling, they generally aren't viewed as very credible. But they were what Trump wanted to hear. And they kicked off this whole scandal, basically. Was Parnas quiet during the House impeachment hearings? Parnas was still on the team as the impeachment inquiry kicked off on Trump's team.

I idolized him. I mean, I thought he was the savior. But then things took a turn for him. Parnas and Fruman were arrested around 6 p.m. last night at Dulles Airport as they were about to board an international flight with one-way tickets. And it turned out that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York had been investigating their activities for some time. As alleged in the indictment, the defendants broke the law to gain political influence while avoiding disclosure of who was actually making the donations and where the money was coming from. So they were suddenly facing legal trouble.

And Parnas changed his posture in behavior that we will remember as familiar from what Michael Cohen did during the Mueller investigation. Parnas started to claim publicly through his lawyer that he had a lot of information that House Democrats might want to know and that the American public might want to know. He said he had documents. He said he had a very interesting story to tell. It seemed that he was interested, theoretically, in getting immunity for his testimony from either the House impeachment, or in the Senate trial. Or he may have been interested in trying to strike a cooperation deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York, though neither of those possibilities seem to have worked out for him so far.

So he escalated. What do you think is the main inaccuracy or the main lie that's being told that you feel like you can correct? That the president didn't know what was going on. President Trump knew exactly what was going on. He was aware of all of my movements. I wouldn't do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president. I was on the ground doing their work. And he decided to turn over this trove of his text messages that are relevant to the Trump-Ukraine scandal to the House impeachment investigators.

So this gave us a sense, really, of how Parnas, Giuliani and other key figures at the heart of this talked to each other and viewed what they were trying to do. When you say that the president knew about your movements and knew what you were doing, are you saying specifically, and I want to sort of drill down on that, that the president was aware that you and Mr. Giuliani were working on this effort in Ukraine to basically try to hurt Joe Biden's political career. He knew about that. Yeah, it was all about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden. And it was never about corruption. It was never strictly about the Burisma, which included Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. And I think probably the top takeaway in all of this that changes our understanding of the scandal is that in addition to what we had previously understood as the two infamous quid pro quos, the White House meeting in exchange for Biden dirt and the letting the military aid go through in exchange for Biden dirt. There was a third one before either of them, and it involved the firing of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

He even had a breakdown and screamed, fire her to Madeline, his assistant, to secretary before he fired. And she said, Mr. President, I can't do that. He was directing the State Department to remove her and the State Department was refusing? Correct. You'll remember that she testified in the inquiry. I do not understand Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me. So I think what is new in here is that the prosecutor general of Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko, was directly tying his demand for the firing of Yovanovitch with his offer to provide information on something he kept referring to as B and other times as Burisma, the company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of.

And Lutsenko was worried about Yovanovitch because she had been criticizing him for corruption and he very much wanted her gone. And we should add that eventually Lutsenko disavowed all this and said that he didn't actually see any indication that Hunter Biden broke the law in any way. Has the White House responded to all this stuff coming out? Trump has denied in the past that he knew Parnas. And Giuliani has now tried to disavow him as well, saying he's lying, he's in a bad situation, he's just making stuff up. And a lot of Republicans have been saying they don't know who Lev Parnas is.

But what tends to happen after that is that Parnas' attorney, Joseph Bondi, who will be a juror in this trial, to Trump, to Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Kevin McCarthy, Jeff Sessions, John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway. How can you look at what Lev Parnas says and what the documents show and what the president asked for in the summary? There are too many to fully list here. But basically, if you are a top Republican, Lev Parnas probably has a picture of him grinning right next to you. I do not know Lev Parnas.

Oh, well, you are tempting fate there. It seems like he's really excited to talk. Is he going to try and talk at the Senate trial? I guess that's up to Mitch McConnell. It's up to the Senate in this question of whether to call witnesses. And he certainly has said enough things that it would seem that people would want to hear from him under oath. But even Democrats have been a little wary about hitching their wagon to Lev Parnas. Parnas is someone whose evidence, whose testimony should be questioned, challenged, like any other witness. But he should be a witness. He should have his documents presented to the Senate. You know, there will certainly be some discussion about whether he should be subpoenaed for Senate testimony.

And we'll just have to see what happens. Andrew, the sense we had back in December, the last time we spoke about this on the show with you, was that the president's been impeached. The Republicans will acquit no matter what. In the intervening weeks, has that sense changed for you at all? That big picture hasn't changed, but we have gotten a few reminders that there could be a few more twists and turns before this whole thing is over. Nothing has happened to sufficiently shake the rock-solid Republican support of Donald Trump just yet. But, you know, with Bolton, with Lev Parnas, we've gotten indications that there is still more that we don't know about what happened here. And those facts could come out and it could make it even uglier for the Senate Republicans who already have their minds made up to acquit Trump to actually cast that vote. So now the question is whether Mitch McConnell can cut this thing off and protect Trump before it gets too out of hand or whether a few Republican senators will revolt

and want to hear more about this, will want to bring in those witnesses, even though what they have to say could be very uncomfortable for the president. Andrew Prokop will be covering the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump for Vox. You can follow along at Vox.com or on Twitter. He is at AWProkop. That's cop with a K.

I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. Ramos-Furham with a W. This is Ukraine Explained.