michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[music]

Today, just three US presidents have confronted the possibility that members of their own party would support their impeachment. Only one left office because of it. My colleague Natalie Kitroeff talked to White House reporter Peter Baker about what to expect this time. It’s Tuesday, October 1.

natalie kitroeff

Peter, walk us through the extraordinary circumstances of the only time a president facing impeachment left office under pressure from his own party, Richard Nixon.

archived recording (richard nixon) I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so-called Watergate affair.

peter baker

Well, this of course was two years into Watergate. There had been investigations for many, many months.

archived recording (richard nixon) I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.

peter baker

And Nixon had basically survived it up until this point, and Republicans largely stayed with him. What really finally did him in, what finally put things over the edge was something they call the “Smoking Gun Tape.”

archived recording What did the president know and when did he know it? On July 16, Alexander Butterfield, a former White House official shocked the Senate Watergate Committee by saying the president’s conversations were on tape.

peter baker

And this particular tape of a conversation showed that Nixon, in fact, had ordered his aides to tell the C.I.A. to block the F.B.I. investigation into Watergate.

[music]

archived recording (richard nixon) And because these people are plugging for — for keeps and that they should call the F.B.I. in and say that we wish for the country — don’t go any further into this case, period.

peter baker

In other words, he had directly ordered the cover-up. That was a bridge too far. For the Republicans, that was the final straw.

archived recording Congressman Rhodes and Senator Scott and I have just concluded a visit with the president.

peter baker

There is this dramatic moment when three senior Republicans from Congress, Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, Hugh Scott, they come to the White House, and they tell Nixon —

archived recording We have told him that situation is very gloomy on Capitol Hill, and that it is a very distressing situation.

peter baker

It’s over. The time is up. He no longer has enough support to survive. He’s not only going to be impeached by the House, but convicted by the Senate. He probably only has 10 Republican senators who are still willing to stand with him. That’s when they abandoned him. And it’s only at that point did they abandon him —

archived recording (richard nixon) I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

peter baker

Which of course prompted him to resign. Rather than face the humiliation of impeachment and conviction by the Senate, he would short circuit the process in effect by saying, I give up. I’m out of here.

archived recording (richard nixon) To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the president and the Congress.

natalie kitroeff

So obviously, there’s a lot of similarities to that moment and the one we’re in now. You could argue that we have the proverbial smoking gun with the transcript that the White House itself released last week of Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine. So why doesn’t it seem like the same thing is happening now?

peter baker

Right. In fact, you heard House Democrats when they read that rough transcript of the phone call say it was a smoking gun. They used that term “smoking gun.”

archived recording That is the smoking gun. I personally think that that document is the smoking gun. We should not be trying to find a secret smoking gun. Donald Trump is the smoking gun.

peter baker

Evoking the Watergate parallel. What you didn’t hear was a lot of Republicans say it.

archived recording This was a normal conversation between two leaders, and we’ve got the president of Ukraine saying there was no pressure.

peter baker

Most of the Republicans said, no, I don’t think this tells us enough about the president’s interactions with Ukraine to suggest it was somehow nefarious. He simply made a request that the Ukrainians investigate corruption. There’s no quid pro quo.

archived recording No quid pro quo, no talk about aid. archived recording (richard nixon) No quid pro quo. The Democratic chairmen themselves said there was no quid pro quo here.

peter baker

Quid pro quo, of course, would be if you do this, I’ll do that, or if you don’t do this, something will happen or not happen.

archived recording (lindsey graham) From my point of view, to impeach any president over a phone call like this would be insane.

peter baker

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who’s one of the president’s closest allies said —

archived recording (lindsey graham) This seems to me like a political setup. It’s all hearsay. You can’t get a parking ticket conviction based on hearsay. The whistle blower didn’t hear the phone call. archived recording Right. archived recording (lindsey graham) Who told the blower about the phone call and everything else?

peter baker

— There was no there there. It was a nothing burger. He said it would have had to have been the president talking in kind of more of a thuggish voice threatening the president of Ukraine that would have changed his mind. But since he didn’t, he said that there’s nothing there to call a high crime and misdemeanor.

archived recording What do you make of this exchange?

peter baker

You know, Kevin McCarthy who’s the House Republican leader said on 60 Minutes.

archived recording (kevin mccarthy) President Zelensky says we are almost ready to buy more javelins from the United States for defense purposes. And President Trump replies, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” archived recording He just added another word. archived recording (kevin mccarthy) No, it’s — archived recording He said, I’d like you to do you a favor, though? archived recording (kevin mccarthy) Yes. It’s in the White House transcript.

peter baker

He tried to correct the interviewer as to the wording of the transcript and, in fact, didn’t realize what it actually had said: “I want you to do us a favor, though.” And Kevin McCarthy didn’t know that the word “though” had been in there and certainly hadn’t fixated on it anyway as a particularly meaningful piece of evidence.

natalie kitroeff

The difference here is that the smoking gun is not quite as smoking as it was in the case of Nixon.

peter baker

Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Anyway, it hasn’t been seen by both parties in the same way that the Smoking Gun Tape was seen in 1974.

natalie kitroeff

So how does President Trump’s approach to all of this compare to Nixon’s?

peter baker

When the Smoking Gun Tape came out in 1974, Nixon takes the hint. Rather than face the humiliation of impeachment and conviction by the Senate, he would short circuit the process in effect by saying, I give up. I’m out of here. And 25 years later when Bill Clinton faced impeachment —

archived recording (bill clinton) I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.

peter baker

He absolutely refused to resign. A lot of Democrats would have liked him to. They were very unhappy with what he had done. They thought he had brought shame to the office and had damaged the party.

archived recording (bill clinton) I will continue to do the work of the American people. We still, after all, have to save Social Security and Medicare for the 21st century.

peter baker

But Clinton showed something different. He showed that if you just simply stick it out, if you simply aren’t ashamed, if you don’t let embarrassment or ridicule or constant battering drive you out, that you can probably bluff your way into holding onto office.

archived recording (bill clinton) I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life. The question is, what are we going to do now?

peter baker

And Clinton said basically to Congress, I dare you. Try it. Try to take me out, because you can’t.

natalie kitroeff

So if you’re Trump and you’re looking at that history, there’s a strong case for following Clinton’s lead, not Nixon’s, and being defiant in the face of all this pressure.

peter baker

Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, you know, I wrote a book about Clinton’s impeachment called “The Breach.” And while I was doing the research for it, I interviewed a couple Republicans who had been pretty key in investigating Watergate — Howard Baker, who was the senator, and Fred Thompson, who was the Republican counsel. And both them told me in separate interviews something I was really struck by. They both said that if Nixon had followed Clinton’s example and refused to quit, he may never have been removed, that, in fact, if he’d actually gutted it out and called the Senate’s bluff, he might still have won the day. And I think that shows you how much has changed since the 1970s, in terms of our politics and particularly the politics of impeachment.

natalie kitroeff

Peter, it feels worth noting that what you’re pointing out is that the congressional process has never actually removed a president during impeachment. We think of the Nixon story as an example of bipartisan action on this, but it wasn’t quite that.

peter baker

That’s exactly right. In the end, Nixon gave up. And the question is whether in today’s political environment, whether there could ever be a moment where a two-thirds majority in the Senate that would have to compose members of both parties would ever agree to remove a president. Up until now anyway, the American public has not been interested in an impeachment of President Trump. That may be beginning to change. CBS, in fact, over the weekend. They found that 55 percent of Americans now support impeachment inquiry. And that’s the first time a majority of Americans have done that. So that changed the dynamics a little bit. But if you’re a Republican, the more important number is probably the number of Republicans who support the president at this point, which is still in the 80 to 90 percent range in most polls. In other words, the president is still very popular with Republican core voters.

natalie kitroeff

So what you’re saying is it might not matter to Republicans that much, that the broader public opinion has shifted toward favoring an impeachment inquiry.

peter baker

It’s not the most important thing. I mean, what’s changed in the last 20 years since the Clinton impeachment, the last 40 some years since the Nixon impeachment, is the parties have really become more and more homogenized, so that there really are just conservatives in the Republican Party and just liberals in the Democratic Party and not a lot of people in the middle anymore, and they’re running in districts where the greater threat is that you lose your seat to somebody on your flank, not that you lose swing voters in the middle, right? So if you’re a Republican, you’re more concerned that you lose the support of conservatives than you do that you lose the support of independents or moderates. And that means that your incentive structure is to stay with a president who is popular with the core voters.

natalie kitroeff

Can you think of a single Republican senator who seems likely to break from the party in this moment?

peter baker

I think you can imagine a scenario if the House were to impeach and if there continued to be some revelations that were damaging to the president, in which a handful of Republican senators might vote against the president.

archived recording (mitt romney) I did read the transcript.

peter baker

You know, Mitt Romney has expressed his concern over what’s happening with Ukraine.

archived recording (mitt romney) It remains troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling.

peter baker

Senator Ben Sasse has said —

archived recording Quote, Republicans ought not be rushing to circle the wagons and say there’s no “there” there when there’s obviously a lot that’s very troubling there.

peter baker

— that this stuff is troubling. I don’t think either one of them is at the moment ready to declare that they would be for a remove from office. But a handful of them at least would be potentially open to that possibility if the facts that presented itself. It’s hard to see 20.

natalie kitroeff

And why is that number relevant?

peter baker

Well, let’s just remember how impeachment works, of course.

[music]

Impeachment starts in the House of Representatives, and it requires a majority of members of the House to vote to impeach the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Now, that’s like an indictment. It’s a charge, in effect, the president has committed crimes against the republic, if you will. If House Majority were to pass an impeachment article against the president, it then goes to the Senate. The Senate would then in theory put the president on trial. The trial would — if the Clinton precedent were to hold — bring members of the House over who had voted to impeach the president —

archived recording William Jefferson Clinton has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Convict him and remove him.

peter baker

— to serve as prosecutors if you will. They call them managers.

archived recording Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.

peter baker

And then the president would be entitled to bring lawyers of his own to the Senate floor to defend him.

archived recording We are here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse of marital infidelity, not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society.

peter baker

And then the evidence would be presented, and the Senate would vote. Now, to actually convict the president and remove him from office would require a two-thirds vote. Now, in this Senate, that would mean 67 votes. Because there are, in fact, only 47 Democrats, that means you need at least 20 Republican senators to vote to convict. Otherwise, the president would be acquitted, and he would remain in office for the rest of his term.

natalie kitroeff

And Peter, do we know for sure that Mitch McConnell is going to have a trial?

peter baker

Well, that’s a great question. People have been asking over the last few days because, you know, he of course, didn’t have a vote on Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination in 2016. Sp a lot of people say, well, maybe he would just simply declare that he wouldn’t take it up. But he actually just said on Monday —

archived recording (mitch mcconell) Well, I would have no choice but to take it up. How long you’re on it is a whole different matter. But I would have no choice but to take it up based on a Senate rule on impeachment.

peter baker

The Constitution doesn’t require him to take it up. The Constitution says the Senate has the power to try a president, but the Senate rules do specifically say that if the house impeaches a president that the Senate must take it up the very next day. Now, what kind of trial it would be, we don’t know. You could open the trial, and then supporter of the president’s or even Mitch McConnell himself could introduce a motion to dismiss the case on the basis that there is no evidence or not enough evidence or that that doesn’t seem likely to get to a 2/3 vote, so why bother to belabor the process? You could have this motion to dismiss, and then that could be passed by a majority of the Senate. And then, in fact, the trial would be over. They tried this during the Clinton case. It didn’t work. So there is some precedent for it. The truth is there have only been two Senate trials of a president in our history, one in 1868, one in 1999. Both times, they kind of made up as they went along, because there is no rulebook for this. So you can imagine that we would be making it up as we go along all over again.

[music]

natalie kitroeff

We’ll be right back.

[music]

So McConnell is indicating that he’s willing to hold this Senate trial, but we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go down. And in any case, all signs are pointing to the Senate acquitting Trump.

peter baker

Right, exactly. Something drastic would have to change, presumably, like for instance, the economy going bad, the president’s poll numbers going south in a serious way, not just across the board, but also with Republicans. Things like that would probably have to happen in order to see such a drastic defection from the Republican caucus in the Senate.

natalie kitroeff

So given those dynamics, what is the G.O.P.‘s strategy for talking about this phone call and the whistleblower’s allegations to voters?

peter baker

Well, one thing they are trying to do is to make it out as if this is strictly a radical effort by disgruntled Democrats who never got over losing the 2016 election —

archived recording They’re angry about the 2016 election, and ultimately, they’re angry at the voters. They’re angry that the voters elected President Trump, all of this from day one. From day one, they have been wanting to get this president out of office.

peter baker

— to in effect have a coup d’etat against President Trump. You see email after email, attack after attack on individual Democrats from supporting an impeachment inquiry.

archived recording Our extreme left is angry. They’re marching in the street with pitchforks and torches.

peter baker

Congresswoman so-and-so has given in to the radical socialist left of her party, or Congressman so-and-so is just part of a mob attack on the president. So they’re trying to turn it on the Democrats. They also, of course, want to focus on Joe Biden.

archived recording Everywhere Joe Biden goes, his son follows and gets millions of dollars from the government. The president is right to ask for an investigation.

peter baker

You don’t hear them say, hey, everything the president did was fine. There’s no problem here. And here’s the reason why. They prefer to attack his accusers.

natalie kitroeff

And there’s a parallel there, right? With what the Democrats were saying in the late ‘90s about the G.O.P. and its obsession with Clinton.

peter baker

Yeah, that’s exactly right. They didn’t want to go around defending Clinton. They didn’t think that Clinton was worth defending in the sense of what he had done. But they did want to attack the Republicans by saying they had gone too far.

archived recording (hillary clinton) The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

peter baker

They had caved in to the right wing extremist of their party. They were obsessed with sex, and this was a wholly illegitimate effort.

archived recording Mr. Speaker, Republicans, put your country defend your party.

peter baker

So while the subject matter of the two impeachments was starkly different, some of the tone and the rhetoric you’re hearing, there is some parallel.

natalie kitroeff

Peter, it strikes me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had to have known all of this would be the case when they decided to move forward with the impeachment inquiry. So why, in their minds, was it the right thing to do?

peter baker

Yeah, it’s a great question, because up until now, Nancy Pelosi has not been interested in doing an impeachment. She was there as a member of the Congress in 1998.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton and until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer.

peter baker

Didn’t think it worked out too well for the Republicans.

archived recording Tonight on C-SPAN, campaign ‘98 results.

peter baker

A party line impeachment didn’t help the Republicans at the polls in 1998.

archived recording Democrats had a much better day than anybody would have expected a few weeks ago, and if —

peter baker

And also was seen by history as kind of somewhat less than a noble effort. She didn’t want the Democrats to be seen as partisan attackers of Trump who can’t get over their hatred of him, so they impeach him. But when this one came up, it just broke the dam. It’s just finally, OK, we’ve got to do something here, and I think that the Speaker felt she had no choice but to move ahead.

natalie kitroeff

But I guess what I mean is if the Democrats knew that impeachment basically never ends with a president leaving office, and the idea that Trump would leave of his own volition like Nixon is highly unlikely, then this impeachment story seems potentially more likely to go the way of Clinton despite the presence of what the Democrats are calling a smoking gun.

peter baker

At the moment, that’s right. But the difference is that both Nixon and Clinton were in their second terms, right? They were not going to serve more than a couple more years no matter what. This is the first time we’ve had an elected president in his first term facing an impeachment. So immediately after this decision, the voters will have a chance to decide, either because the president will be there still, and they will decide whether to keep him there, or because they’ll decide to throw him out, or because maybe he will be removed from office and we’ll be having Vice President Pence standing up as the nominee for the Republican Party. There’s a lot of different options here. But I think that really, we’re seeing something that’s different than any previous impeachment battle that we’ve seen. Voters didn’t get a chance to vote on Bill Clinton directly after his impeachment trial. They didn’t get a chance to vote on Richard Nixon at all. Andrew Johnson didn’t even get his party nomination, so he didn’t run after his impeachment trial. This is the first time, assuming President Trump doesn’t leave office, that voters will render a judgment on a president shortly after an impeachment and a trial, assuming they happen. And so I think we have transformed the conversation that we’re about to have for the next 13 months.

natalie kitroeff

Peter, thank you so much.

peter baker

Thank you.

[music]

michael barbaro

The Times reports that President Trump pressured another foreign leader for a political favor in recent weeks. During a phone call with the prime minister of Australia, Trump pushed for help to discredit the special counsel’s Russia investigation. Afterward, the White House restricted access to records of the call, just as it did to the transcript of the president’s July call to the leader of Ukraine. On Monday, House Democrats issued their second subpoena related to that call, this time to the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seeking his private communications with the president.

archived recording Mr. President, do you now know who the whistleblower is, sir? archived recording (donald trump) Well, we’re trying to find out about a whistleblower. We have a whistleblower that reports things that were incorrect.

michael barbaro

At the White House, President Trump said he was eager to identify the whistleblower despite legal protections specifically designed to keep the whistleblower anonymous.

[music]

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today. On Monday, California’s governor Gavin Newsom signed a law allowing college athletes at public and private universities to sign endorsement deals with major companies, a decision that could ultimately transform the economics of college sports.

archived recording Billions and billions of dollars, 14 plus billion dollars goes to these universities, goes to these colleges, billion plus revenue to the NCAA themselves, and the actual product, the folks that are putting their lives on the line, putting everything on the line are getting nothing.

peter baker

Under current rules, such deals are prohibited, a system that has allowed universities and TV networks to profit from college sports, but prevented the athletes themselves from earning money.

archived recording It’s going to initiate dozens of other states introduce similar legislation, and it’s going to change college sports for the better by having now the interest, finally, of the athletes on par with the interests of the institutions. Now, we’re rebalancing that power arrangement.

[music]

michael barbaro

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

[music]