Today, Explained - Trumpster fire

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Last week, the White House stonewalled the impeachment inquiry. This week, the stonewall came crumbling down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Matthew Iglesias, host of The Weeds podcast. Last week, the White House strategy was stonewalling this impeachment inquiry, calling it a kangaroo court, etc. How did that work out for the White House this week? It did not work out well. Large pieces of stone started falling out of the wall. And I think the main reason is that a lot of the witnesses of interest here are career civil servants. They're foreign service officers who don't have any particular loyalty to Donald Trump. And then some of them are political appointees,

but who disagreed with Rudy Giuliani and Trump on the underlying policy issue here and would like to tell their story. And then the more people who speak, the greater incentive everybody else has to come out and at least tell their side of the story, put a positive spin on it, maybe point the finger at somebody else. So what you're really seeing is a kind of classic unraveling of a cover-up type scenario where more and more people are trying to say something. What they're saying does not 100% agree, in part because everyone's trying to make themselves look better in this. But we are getting more and more information, and I think more will come. Okay, let's talk about the talkers. With whom should we begin?

I think this should start with Marie Yovanovitch. And she actually spoke last Friday. Defying the Trump administration, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch went before lawmakers today after the State Department tried to block her testimony. She was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. She's a career foreign servant. She was pushed out of that job approximately by Rudy Giuliani, I think ultimately by Donald Trump. I do not know Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me, Yovanovitch wrote in her statement, adding, the harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine

see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system. And, you know, she paints a story of an administration that was determined to go outside the regular diplomatic process and have the U.S. relationship with Ukraine run not through the National Security Council and the State Department, but through his personal lawyer, the former mayor of New York, along with the ambassador to the EU. Ukraine's not in the EU. And possibly Energy Secretary Rick Perry. So it sets the stage for the fact that something untoward was happening here. I wonder how much pressure she felt from Congress to testify or from the White House to not testify.

I mean, you know, there's pressure on all of these people to not testify. The White House was purporting to be able to order them not to do it. The Stonewall. Yes. And what we've had is Congress has sort of issued subpoenas, not so much to people who don't want to testify to coerce them into testifying, but to people who do want to testify. So they can now say, ah, there's these like competing constitutional authorities. Congress has subpoenaed me, but the White House says I shouldn't do it, but I think I should go do it. So did her decision to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry ultimately influence others? I mean, it seems to have made a difference to other people, in particular, Fiona Hill,

who had been the NSC's senior director for that region. She came and spoke. George Kent, who's a State Department official in D.C. who was in charge of Ukraine, he came out and spoke. And then Ambassador Sondland, who is a Trump appointee and who initially it seemed like wasn't going to testify, changed his mind and said, well, he was going to do it. So that's kind of the dam breaking in terms of testimony. Well, let's go through all of them one by one, starting with Fiona Hill, who was senior director of Russia and Europe policy at the National Security Council. She testified on Monday.

Hill's appearance has caused concern among those close to Trump because she played a central role in the administration's Russian and Ukrainian policy. Fiona Hill, you know, she paints a picture of herself and her boss, John Bolton, at the National Security Council as really trying hard to get aid delivered to Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani holding it up for ways that really frustrated them. She said that Bolton told her, I'm not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up. That's like a very sort of potent phrase. We haven't heard it out of John Bolton's mouth, per se.

But, you know, this is Fiona Hill, who was running Russia and Ukraine policy. She's saying that this seemed dirty to them at the time, right? It wasn't just a policy disagreement. They were vehement about it. They analogized it to criminal activities and wanted to clarify that they had no part in this, that this was not them. It was happening over their objections

in ways that they thought were weird and inappropriate. The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help alarmed John Bolton so much that he told an aide to alert White House lawyers that Giuliani was a hand grenade who will blow everyone up. John Bolton, voice of reason. John Bolton, I would say, not so much voice of reason, but voice of real ideology in this case.

Right. I mean, he's a guy who signed up with Trump because he wanted to implement a hard right foreign policy. Trump has done that in some areas. But with regard to Russia, he has been very scattershot. And in particular, with regard to Ukraine, he seemed much more interested in Hunter Biden than in right-wing foreign policy. Fiona Hill on Monday, and then we go to George Kent on Tuesday. What did he have to say?

Kent said that the Trump administration has been involved in an improper effort to get dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. I mean, he has really painted the picture of the rogue administration, the quid pro quo. He kind of, you know, this is a career guy. He came out in his sort of like waspy bow tie, State Department guy. And, you know, he's like painting the picture of exactly what Trump's critics have been saying was going on. I should note, he also did say that way back in 2015, I mean, he's a career guy, and he said that he raised a concern that it was a bad look to have Hunter Biden on the board of this company. So to some extent, that's a point for Trump. At the same time, you know,

it underscores that this is not a partisan hatchet job. He had been following this issue closely for years. He thought it looked kind of bad. But then he also said that Trump was trying to conduct a smear campaign against Joe Biden, that the sort of appearance of impropriety was real. But like he believed as a guy who had complained about this at the time, that nothing bad actually happened. There was nothing to investigate. And, you know, he, like a lot of people who were working on Ukraine policy, was just frustrated because the scandal is sort of about the political dirt. But from the standpoint of professionals like Kent, like people in the military, people on the National Security Council, the point was just Ukraine needed these

missiles and Congress had authorized the money and they wanted to give it to them. After that, it's the current EU ambassador, Gordon Sondland. And there was a lot of back and forth over whether he would testify at all. Yeah, I mean, Gordon Sondland, this is a Trump loyalist. He is a Trump campaign donor who was made ambassador to the EU. That's the kind of job that has been going to donors. But, you know, he's like a Trump guy. Well, President Trump has not only honored me with the job of being the U.S. ambassador to the EU, but he's also given me other special assignments, including Ukraine. So he could have resisted testifying if he wanted to.

But he decided to testify. And what he basically did in his testimony is throw Rudy Giuliani under the bus. And according to his testimony, Sondland said Giuliani's focus on alleged 2016 election interference and the Ukraine Energy Company, where Hunter Biden sat on the board, came into focus over time. Quote, I did not understand until much later that Mr. Giuliani's agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians directly or indirectly in the president's 2020 reelection campaign. Other people have portrayed Sondland and Giuliani as very much working together on this issue. Sondland kind of is like, well, you know, Trump kept telling me to talk to Rudy, to defer to Rudy, but he claims that he didn't know Giuliani's agenda here had anything

to do with Joe or Hunter Biden. It's not very plausible. Like there was an article in The New York Times saying that Rudy Giuliani was running a Ukraine policy all about Hunter Biden months before Sondland says he figured this out. You know, maybe there's a guy, he's running Ukraine policy, but he doesn't read major newspaper articles about it. But it doesn't have the ring of truth to it. What it has the ring of is people get caught up in a scandal

and they start trying to save their own skin. I think with all of these developments and all of these testimonies, it's kind of hard to remember that this all started with a whistleblower complaint just because so many people have been implicated at this point. With so many people involved in this or witnessing this, how did it take a CIA whistleblower to kick it off? People have to come forward. It takes courage, right? I mean, Trump has been out there saying, well, we should find out who this whistleblower was. We should treat him like a

traitor, which is to say, kill him. People don't want to take that on for personal reasons, professional reasons, a million other reasons. Once the ball gets rolling, that calculus changes. So a lot of what we're talking about here so far has come out through people talking to the press, leaking to the press. But all of these testimonies have been behind closed doors. Why is that? Yeah. So some people are a little confused by this. But the basic idea is that House Democrats are treating this similar to a grand jury inquiry in which you want to make the testimony private so that new people who come in aren't exactly sure what other people have said. So it's harder for them to sort of get their story straight. It's not giving liberals at home the drama that they exactly want to see where people are like up there on TV and their favorite House members are saying cool stuff. But it makes sense as an investigatory technique.

And you also see that unlike a grand jury, the House chairmen are quite willing to leak to the press about broadly speaking what they heard. And some of the witnesses do too because it's quote unquote like a grand jury, but it's not actually a grand jury. So they do it privately, but then everybody talks. But for everyone thirsting to see some of this play out in public, they did get sort of like some sort of ad hoc press conference from acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney yesterday. What was the occasion? Yeah, this was a weird one. So they put Mulvaney out to announce that the G7 meeting is going to be held at the Doral Resort that Donald Trump owns. This is obviously a questionable undertaking all of its own. But I guess they wanted somebody to make that announcement.

But then he started getting questions about Ukraine, which he started answering, I think not in the way the White House wanted him to answer. Did he also mention to me in the past that the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it. And that's why we held up the money. Now, there was a report. So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding to Ukraine. The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation. So Mulvaney basically conceded that the aid holdup was part of a quid pro quo. It is. Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democratic server happened as well.

We do that all the time with foreign policy. He said that's fine. He said... Get over it. That there's always politics in foreign policy. Then after it became clear what a fiasco this was, he started trying to backtrack and say he hadn't said the stuff that he clearly said. Yeah.

But he really did say it. So knowing everything we know now from these testimonies, from the whistleblower complaint itself, from everything that's come out since, how many people in this administration are implicated at this point? It looks like the really key implicated players are Rudy Giuliani, who is not in the administration. Is he still the president's lawyer?

He is still the president's lawyer. Okay. Then it's the so-called three amigos of Ukraine policy. That's Sondland, it's Kurt Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine, and its energy secretary, Rick Perry. Yeah. So Perry's role in this is a little less clear, but it seems like some role. But he announced yesterday that he's resigning. Yes, he is on his way out the door. And then we have Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff and OMB chief. He was sort of actually the guy in charge of releasing or in this case, not releasing the funds. And then we have, of course, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He was actually on the sort of infamous call with President Zelensky. We have Mike Pence, who delivered some messages to President Zelensky. And we have Attorney General Bill Barr, who's been doing some investigations into DNC and the server. He came up directly in President Trump's call with President Zelensky, as well as, I think, in some of the other communications around this. What does this all add up to?

How does this look for the president? It looks bad for the president. I will say the saving grace for Trump, right? The Mulvaney whatever everybody does it line. Get over it. That's not true. But I do think that it speaks to his ultimate line of defense, which is that there is a lot of cynicism about American politics and the American government. And when I have spoken to like Trump fans outside of his hotel in Washington and I say to them like, like, what's up with this? Like people can just like pay bribes to the president.

They tell me everybody does it. They don't say like, no, this is 100 percent above board. And I just don't know how far you can get with that. Right. Because it's one thing to put forward evidence that Trump was doing some shady stuff. It's another thing to try to prove to people that the general standard of conduct in American politics is higher than this. I think it is. But, you know, the 40% of people who are behind Trump, do they? Yeah. I guess we'll find out. We'll find out soon. Well, last week it was the Stonewall. This week it was the Stonewall crumbling. What is it next week?

It will be interesting to see whether Democrats can get more people and higher profile people to come testify. That's sort of the next big thing here, right? Will John Bolton testify? Will they be able to get Rudy Giuliani to testify? The Democrats are also asking themselves, like, well, should we just wrap this up? Because on the one level, it looks pretty clear at this point. On the other level, it kind of seems like, well, you want to hear from some more people just for the principle of the thing. And some people want to stage public hearings, something like that.

But for now, it looks like they may be on a pretty rapid track to just saying, we have a clear story here. Military aid was withheld. It was withheld for political reasons. Mick Mulvaney said so from the podium. That's impeachable. Matthew Iglesias is the host of The Weeds podcast from Vox. If you can't get enough impeachment, Vox is launching a brand new wall-to-wall impeachment podcast that will drop weekly on Saturdays.

It's called Impeachment Explained because, of course, and it's hosted by friend of the show Ezra Klein. You can find it and subscribe right now. First episode drops this Saturday, tomorrow. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. The mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is on the beat. So is Noam Hassenfeld, who also produces. Amina Alsadi, Bridget McCarthy, and Halima Shah

produced the show, too. Afim Shapiro's the engineer. Jillian Weinberger and Jelani Carter helped this week. Olivia Ekstrom pitched in, too. And Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of the show. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.