Today, Explained - The Trump Years: Win at all costs

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

In the third of our five-part series, Vox’s Andrew Prokop says there’s one key takeaway from the Mueller investigation and impeachment: Trump will do anything to win an election. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear. That I will faithfully execute. That I will faithfully execute. The office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God. So help me God.

Congratulations, Mr. President. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferrum. Four years ago, Donald Trump from reality TV won the presidency, and our shared reality hasn't been the same since. The relentless pace of headlines, controversies, and tweets has rendered the country divided at present and unable to fully recollect the past. I've seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes.

We struggle to remember what this president said or did last month, let alone in 2017. This October, leading up to the 2020 election, we're going to help you remember. In the coming weeks, we're bringing you The Trump Years, a series that looks back on what Donald Trump did during his four years as president of the United States and what it means for the future of the American political experiment. On today's show,

win at all costs. If you caught the final presidential debate last night, you heard the president run through some of his greatest hits. I was put through a phony witch hunt for three years. President Trump has played this song so many times that Joe Biden just immediately looked up to the heavens in exasperation. Let me just say this.

Mueller and 18 angry Democrats and FBI agents all over the place spent $48 million. They went through everything I had, including my tax returns, and they found absolutely no collusion and nothing wrong. That's the president's narrative on the Mueller investigation. No collusion, did nothing wrong. Impeachment, it was a hoax. No quid pro quo. He had a perfect phone call with the president of Ukraine. It's important to remember that this is a false narrative, that the revelations from the Mueller investigation and the president's impeachment inquiry are manifold and have direct implications on this election we're in right now.

Andrew Prokop, Politics Vox, remind us? I think the takeaway from both the Russia investigation and the Ukraine impeachment inquiry is pretty much the same. It's that when Donald Trump is trying to win an election, he will embrace shady, unethical, dubiously legal tactics in order to try and make that happen. Well, the Russia investigation truly does feel like a lifetime ago. I believe it begins even before Donald Trump is elected president in 2016. Where do we begin if we're going to go back and look at how that unfolded? It depends how you start the clock. The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation into members of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia on July 31st, 2016.

They did so for a few reasons. One was that the Russian government had been blamed for a hack of the DNC. The supposedly neutral DNC officials discuss raising the issue of whether Bernie Sanders was an atheist and perhaps planting a story that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess. The DNC's private emails were then dumped onto the WikiLeaks website and posted publicly by WikiLeaks. It was a very embarrassing spectacle. We are talking about a slow leak every day, a new batch. And the Clinton campaign knows this could be a problem for them every day until Election Day. There was no indication that the Trump team was involved in that in any way,

except that an Australian diplomat had heard from Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos. We asked him, it might have been I asked him, whether he thought Trump would win the Republican nomination. He was very confident about that. And I said, well, what about the general election against Hillary Clinton? That would be pretty hard going, wouldn't it? And he said he thought that Trump would win. He said, in any case, the Russians might use some material they have on Hillary and that will do her a lot of damage.

So this Australian diplomat was alarmed about this and he told the U.S. government. And so the FBI started to investigate this question of what the people close to Donald Trump knew about this Russian effort to interfere with the 2016 election by hurting Democrats. Now, it's important to remember that Robert Mueller wasn't involved from the outset, though we often refer to this entire affair as the Mueller investigation, when exactly did he take over? Mueller ended up taking over in May 2017. And what happened in between is that the FBI continued to investigate several people close to Trump for their ties to Russia, including Michael Flynn, who Trump had picked to be his national security advisor. So during the transition period, President Obama placed these sanctions on Russia and expelled Russian diplomats from the country in an attempt to punish them for their interference with the election.

And Michael Flynn then had a series of conversations with the ambassador to Russia, Sergei Kislyak, in which he told Kislyak basically not to retaliate too much over those sanctions, basically play it cool and wait for Trump to get into office. Make sure that you can convey this, OK? Do not allow this administration to box us in right now, OK? Kislyak responds, we have conveyed it. Kislyak was heavily surveilled. So word of those conversations soon leaked out.

The FBI was concerned about them. They were wondering about Flynn's motives here. And so eventually they interviewed Flynn and Flynn gave a false story about what happened. He told Vice President Mike Pence a false story. He told White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer a false story. And he told the two FBI agents who interviewed him a false story. So when this all leaked out to the press, Trump asked Flynn to step down. Mike Flynn is a fine person, and I asked for his resignation.

He respectfully gave it. But the next day, Trump had a meeting with James Comey, the director of the FBI. He asked Comey to stay behind after a larger meeting. I understood him to be saying that what he wanted me to do was drop any investigation connected to Flynn's account of his conversations with the Russians. And Comey was very alarmed by this. It struck him as being at least near the line of obstruction of justice from the president and made him wonder what the president was covering up.

So Comey continued to push forward with the Russia investigation in the ensuing months. Trump became angry at Comey for first confirming the investigation's existence during testimony to Congress and then for refusing to say that Trump himself wasn't under investigation. So Trump then pulled the trigger and fired Comey in May 2017, which caused a crisis over the next week or so as all sorts of fears reigned about what Trump might be covering up, what he was trying to do here, whether he was trying to corrupt the Justice Department. And so eventually, in response to all this pressure, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, put him in charge of this whole Russia investigation and investigation of Trump associates' ties to Russia. And that was May 2017. The Mueller investigation officially began.

Mueller was a prosecutor. He wanted to answer the question of whether there had been prosecutable crimes committed here, rather than the broader question of whether there were inappropriate links to the Russian government or Trump advisors working on behalf of the Russian government in some way. Mueller zeroed in on crimes, and he found a lot of crimes. During the course of our investigation, we charged more than 30 defendants with committing federal crimes, including 12 officers of the Russian military. Seven defendants have been convicted or pled guilty. In the end, Mueller did not prove any criminal conspiracy between Trump associates and the Russian government. His eventual report revealed a lot of inappropriate contacts.

And his report also did not say that there was no collusion. It did not make that factual statement, in part because it's difficult to prove a negative. And members of Mueller's team continued to have suspicions about what really might have happened. There were some areas that his investigation didn't look at also. We've recently learned that they decided not to look at Trump's finances at all or the Trump Organization's potential financial ties to wealthy Russians.

The closest Mueller's team came to actually looking at Trump's organization's finances involved their investigation into Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer. I am providing the committee today with several documents, and these include a copy of a check Mr. Trump wrote from his personal bank account after he became president to reimburse me for the hush money payments I made to cover up his affair with an adult film star and to prevent damage to his campaign but after he pleaded guilty to that he also admitted that he was secretly in talks with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign to strike a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.

That provides one clue into something that may have been on Trump's mind involving Russia in the 2016 campaign. Just the potential to make money there. Okay. All told, the Mueller report makes clear that the Trump campaign was up to all sorts of shady shenanigans, was clearly open to working with the Russian government and famously met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower for dirt on Hillary Clinton. And it's important to remember that Mueller and his team looked into all sorts of efforts by the president himself to obstruct the investigation, including firing Comey, pressuring Sessions, floating the idea of pardoning Stone and Manafort. The list goes on. The president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.

That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that too is prohibited. The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. Mueller didn't take a position on obstruction of justice, but pointed to heaps of evidence that, you know, it transpired. Certainly nothing to brag about on the debate stage last night, but that didn't stop the president. I was put through a phony witch hunt. Can we just remind everyone how very real and incriminating this was for everyone standing around the guy Mueller wasn't legally allowed to charge with anything?

Yeah, we had Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. There was Paul Manafort, who was convicted and subsequently pled guilty to various financial and lobbying crimes. There was Rick Gates, Manafort's deputy and Trump's deputy campaign chair, who pleaded guilty to similar charges as Manafort. There was Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, though he's now trying to withdraw that plea.

There were 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies indicted on conspiracy charges related to spreading social media propaganda. There was a California man named Richard Pinedo who pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in relation to that. There was Alex Vandersvahn, a lawyer from London who pleaded guilty to making false statements to Mueller's team. Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort's Russian associate, was charged with attempting to obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses, though he's in Russia, like the other Russians indicted and won't face those charges. There are also 12 officers of Russia's GRU intelligence service charged with crimes related to the hacking and leaking of leading Democrats' emails. Then there was Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty in another investigation

to tax and bank charges and campaign finance violations, but also to lying to Congress about efforts to build the Trump Tower in Moscow. And there was Roger Stone, who was indicted for witness tampering and obstruction of the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference. Are you done? Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Just those ones.

Apart from that, they found nothing. After the break, it's Ukraine Explained. Support for today's explain 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, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC Terms and conditions apply. Born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Ukraine, Ukraine explained. It's Ukraine explained. Andrew, the president didn't get impeached over the Mueller investigation, but he certainly did get impeached. Why wasn't it Mueller? Why was it Ukraine that did the trick?

So because Mueller did not decide whether to say whether the president obstructed justice, that kind of took the wind out of the sails for Democrats who wanted to impeach Trump over Russia. Speaker Pelosi says President Trump is just not worth it. Now, she is not closing the door completely on impeachment, but she says that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan that it's not worth it because impeachment would greatly divide the country. The left of the party really wanted to move forward in this,

but Democratic leaders and moderates were more hesitant. Until news broke about what Trump did with the president of Ukraine. Tonight, an explosive allegation by a government whistleblower that the White House engaged in a cover-up by stashing records of the president's phone call with a foreign leader in a top-secret computer. This, rather than being something that happened all the way back in 2016, this was an attempt by Trump to solicit a foreign government's

interference with the upcoming election in 2020, when he expected that his opponent would be Joe Biden. There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that. The gist of it is that Trump asked the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine. to have his people announce an investigation into a company that was tied to Hunter Biden, Joe's son. And when Zelensky did not seem to want to do this, Trump just happened to be holding up $400 million in military aid for Ukraine that the country was expecting and relying on for its conflict with

Russia. The whole debate became whether this was a quid pro quo that Trump was trying to get the military aid for the help in the election by smearing the Bidens. Why did Democrats decide to take up impeachment on this call, on this quid pro quo? Well, it was a currently unfolding plot to try to get Trump to win the election. It seemed highly inappropriate to use the powers of the presidency for campaign dirty tricks, essentially, to once again try to strong-arm a reluctant foreign leader into providing this campaign assistance. And basically, they wanted to let Trump know

that this was unacceptable. I have been patient when we tried every other path and used every other tool. We will never find the truth unless we use the power given to the House of Representatives and the House alone to begin an official investigation as dictated by the Constitution. And this proved to be a cause that could win over the vulnerable moderates. Just last night, 10 Democrats, most of them from swing districts, the kind of Democrats who have been most cautious about impeachment, all announced that if the new

allegations are true, that they would then be open to impeachment proceedings. And if memory serves, the public hearings began in November of last year. This is the first in a series of public hearings the committee will be holding as part of the House's impeachment inquiry. So they brought in a host of characters from the Trump administration, mainly the State Department, people who were involved in Ukraine policy.

There's Fiona Hill, who worked on Russia policy for the National Security Council. He was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged. There was Gordon Sondland, who was the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Was there a quid pro quo? As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes. And there was Bill Taylor, another state official working on Ukraine policy. At the same time, however, I encountered an irregular informal channel of U.S. policymaking with respect to Ukraine. Unaccountable to Congress.

In the end, there was still a matter of some dispute over whether Trump had explicitly, directly tied the hold on the aid for Ukraine to the attempt to get this campaign dirt and to get Biden and Burisma investigated. There was no pressure. Look at the call. President Zelensky, President Trump. No pressure. There was no conditionality. There was nothing done to get the aid, and the aid actually came. But it was pretty clear what happened here

and what Trump was trying to do. By withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to a nation at war in order to get that nation to intervene in our election by smearing his opponent. So eventually in December, Democrats in the House drafted and approved two articles of impeachment against the president of the United States. The first alleged that he abused his power related to this whole caper, and the second alleged that he obstructed Congress in his attempt to block witnesses

from testifying or documents from being handed over in Congress's investigation of this matter. The clerk will call the roll. Mr. Nadler. Aye. Mr. Nadler votes aye. Mr. Richmond. Yes. Mr. Richmond votes yes. Mr. Jeffries. Aye. Mr. Jeffries votes aye. Mr. Swalwell. Yes. Mr. Swalwell votes yes. Mr. Liu. Aye. Mr. Liu votes aye. Mr. Raskin. Aye. Mr. Raskin votes aye. Ms. Jayapal. Aye. Ms. Jayapal votes aye. Ms. Demings. Aye. Ms. Demings votes aye. Mr. Correa. Aye. Mr. Correa votes aye. Ms. Scanlon. Aye. Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Ms. Garcia. Aye. Ms. Garcia votes aye. Mr. Neguse. Aye. Mr. Correa votes aye. Ms. Scanlon. Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Ms. Garcia. Ms. Garcia votes aye. Mr. Neguse. Mr. Neguse votes aye. Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins votes no. Mr. Chabot. Mr. Chabot votes no. Mr. McClintock. Mr. McClintock votes no. Ms. Lesko. Ms. Lesko votes no. Mr.

Rechenthaler. Mr. Rechenthaler votes no. Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein votes no. Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Klein votes no. Mr. Armstrong votes no. Mr. Stubbe votes no. It feels like such a distant memory now that the president was in fact impeached by the House back in December of 2019. Of course, it then went to the Senate for a trial where nothing really happened. It is therefore ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be and he is hereby acquitted of the charges in said articles. What was the upshot of the impeachment of Donald Trump? You know, I don't think the impeachment saga was costless for Trump. He had this plan that he was very proud of to get Ukraine to dirty up the Bidens. And the plan was ruined.

People exposed it and he looked political. And he lost what he was hoping would be one of his main lines of attack on Biden during the fall. The entire Ukraine attack has been somewhat discredited because of the impeachment saga. But as far as actually removing the president from office, it just looks like that is not going to happen in this very partisan era. because of the impeachment saga. But as far as actually removing the president from office, it just looks like that is not going to happen in this very partisan era. It was a bit of a tumultuous experience for the Foreign Service, as I recall. Has that had a lasting impact? I mean, a lot of diplomats were called in to testify,

and the president was blasting a lot of them as they testified on Twitter. Well, this has been going on throughout the government, and it's been a very disturbing trend that the people who do speak up about Trump's conduct or who attempt to thwart his wishes when he's trying to do something unethical, they don't get rewarded, really. In fact, they usually get punished. Trump tries to retaliate against them. That is actually exactly what we're seeing in the Justice Department right now with regards to the Russia investigation. Since Mueller's team finished up its work, Trump's new attorney general, Bill Barr, has launched a series of reviews about what exactly top officials in the Russia investigation did. He's repeatedly hinted that these officials might be in danger of criminal charges.

So it's an investigation of the investigators, which has been unfolding. And that's a worrying sign that you have in both of these cases. Some Republicans were disturbed by what Trump did, but the vast majority of party officials and importantly, the party's base voters as well, decided to stick with Trump rather than to try to sanction him or check him in this. It feels like both the Russia investigation and the impeachment over the quid pro quo scandal in Ukraine not only tested this presidency, but sort of tested the foundations of American democracy itself. What did we learn when we saw our democracy being tested on TV in these investigations? extremely powerful, and that Trump, in both cases, proved very savvy about constructing a counter-narrative in which he was, in fact, the victim, and there were various saboteurs in the deep state or among the Democratic Party who are the true villains in both of these scenarios. And

a lot of the conservative base and conservative members of Congress ate that up. You know, it's really not clear, especially in the case of if a president breaks the law. It's really not clear what can be done about that at this point. It's pretty alarming stuff. We have a president who's been more corrupt and unethical than any president in decades, probably since Richard Nixon. And the system has proven completely unable to check him. It's entirely up to the voters.

And if Trump does win a second term, then everything we've talked about here will just be the prologue to what he's going to be up to then. Andrew Prokop, he's a senior correspondent at Vox who guided us through I don't even know how many episodes of Ukraine Explained and Mueller coverage. You can find much more of his reporting at Vox.com and you can find out more about our series on the Trump years at Vox.com slash Trump years. We'll be back with more next week. And now, the ones we lost along the way. John McEntee.

A personal aide to President Trump escorted out of the White House. Fired. John Feeley. Resigned. John Dowd. Resigned. Gary Cohn. They said, will Gary Cohn continue or remain in the administration? I said, I hope so. Now, if he leaves, I'm going to say I'm very happy that he left, okay? Resigned. David Sorensen. Resigned. David Sorensen. Resigned. Rachel Brand.

Resigned. Omarosa M. Newman. Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice, and this was the fourth time we let her go. Fired. Taylor Weyaneth. Resigned. Josh Raffel, resigned.

Andrew McCabe. We don't train at Quantico for here's what to do when you think you need to investigate the president of the United States. It's just not a topic that we talk about. Fired. Rob Porter, resigned. Brenda Fitzgerald, resigned. Rex Tillerson. And I'd have to say to him, well, Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can't do it that way. It violates the law. It violates the treaty.

You know, he got really frustrated. Fired. you