michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: The Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry are calling Tuesday’s testimony the most damning yet, implicating President Trump himself in a quid pro quo over military aid to Ukraine. It’s Wednesday, October 23.

[phone ringing]

speaker

This is Edward. How can I help you?

michael barbaro

Hi, there. I’m trying to reach Nick Fandos from The New York Times?

speaker

Oh, yeah. I just saw him go into Booth 1. Hold on a second. Let me transfer you over.

nicholas fandos

Hey, this is Nick.

michael barbaro

Hey, it’s Michael.

nicholas fandos

Hi, Michael. How are you?

michael barbaro

I’m great. How are you?

nicholas fandos

Long time, no talk.

michael barbaro

Yeah. It’s been a full 72 hours.

nicholas fandos

[LAUGHS]

[music]

michael barbaro

Nick Fandos covers Congress for The Times. Nick, where did we leave off with you last week?

nicholas fandos

So remember, last week we heard testimony from a string of American diplomats, both career diplomats and political appointees working for Donald Trump. And what they describe day after day in testimony was, essentially, the traditional American foreign policy apparatus getting sidelined or pushed aside by President Trump, his personal lawyer, and a cadre of political appointees who were close around him and were setting the agenda for the country’s policy toward Ukraine.

michael barbaro

Right. And the names that kept coming up again and again were Rudy Giuliani and Gordon Sondland?

nicholas fandos

That’s right. And by Thursday, we heard from Sondland himself, who you’ll remember is the ambassador to the European Union. He’s a former Trump political donor. Sondland, after witness after witness this week had placed him at the center of this shadow foreign policy, if you will, came in and essentially said, hey, I know there’s all this attention on me, but I was merely following the directions of President Trump.

michael barbaro

And Nick, what did we hear in this testimony about what the point of this shadow structure was? Why have it? What are they up to?

nicholas fandos

So a lot of this testimony revolved around a meeting that the Ukrainians wanted to have with President Trump at the White House that they believed would lend credibility to the new administration in that country. And the questions that came up again and again were, was there a quid pro quo that the Trump administration was trying to extract investigations from the Ukrainians into the president’s political rivals in exchange for that meeting? That they were holding out that meeting and saying, we’ll only give you this if we get what we want. But what’s interesting is what they weren’t testifying about. For the most part, there was very little discussion last week of the military aid that President Trump had ordered to be frozen this summer. This is almost $400 million in security funds that Congress allocated in a bipartisan fashion for Ukraine. And there have been allegations, first from the whistle-blower that initiated this case and throughout, that that aid may have been frozen as a leverage point as well, as another kind of quid pro quo to extract these politically advantageous investigations. But we weren’t hearing a whole lot about that as the week wore on.

michael barbaro

Right. There were two allegations of a quid pro quo. There was the White House visit in exchange for these investigations, and then there was this $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. And my sense is that the allegation that the military aid had been held up in this scheme was by far the more explosive of the two.

nicholas fandos

That’s right. Remember, when House Democrats launched this impeachment inquiry a little bit more than a month ago, it was the prospect of $400 million in bipartisan approved military aid that had most alarmed lawmakers in both parties. It’s that military aid that got moderate Democrats, the ones from swing districts that President Trump won in 2016 who are kind of teetering on the edge as they face re-election, to come on board and say, yes, we do support an inquiry. They threw crucial support behind this investigation explicitly because it was tied to national security.

michael barbaro

Right. And what did you make of the fact that the money, which had been the source of so much focus, wasn’t really coming up? Did that at all cause you to wonder, as I will admit it did for me, if the military aid aspect of the story maybe just wasn’t there? If it hadn’t maybe been something that the president was holding over Ukraine to get these investigations he wanted into the Democrats?

nicholas fandos

I think that that certainly began to feel like more of a possibility. The Trump administration has given publicly other reasons for withholding this aid. And in some respects, it makes sense that they would have withheld it when they were looking to cut down on the expensive foreign aid all over the country. So —

michael barbaro

Right.

nicholas fandos

— I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised if that part of the story continued to shrink away. At the same time, so much of what the original whistle-blower — who has brought this case to the fore, who helped launch this impeachment inquiry indirectly — has alleged has borne out to date, that I don’t think we could fully rule out the idea that the aid had been held up as leverage for these investigations. And so it just remained a kind of open, tantalizing question, will this bear out or won’t it? And that’s where we pick things up this week.

michael barbaro

O.K., so get us up to speed about what actually happened on Tuesday.

nicholas fandos

So on Tuesday morning, William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine right now, arrived on Capitol Hill for his own deposition with House impeachment investigators.

michael barbaro

And what we need to know about Bill Taylor besides that?

nicholas fandos

So Taylor is another one of these career national security officials who has served Democrats and Republicans. He’s been serving the country, he told investigators today, for 50 years, starting as a cadet at West Point, serving in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jerusalem. During George W. Bush’s administration, he was an ambassador to Ukraine. And he had actually retired when the State Department contacted him early this year, after Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador, was ousted by President Trump, and asked him if he’d be willing to come back to take control of the American mission in Ukraine and help to implement the president’s policies. And he began explaining to investigators today that he knew, in a sense, what he was getting into, and he had real pause as he looked toward taking this job. He sought assurances from the State Department, essentially, that he would be able to exercise policy as he saw fit and that he wasn’t going to be a victim of the same kind of political games that she was. With those assurances, he ultimately decided in May that he would sign up. And he flew over to Kiev and began his role as ambassador. What came next, he made pretty clear, is something like his worst nightmare.

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nicholas fandos

And on Tuesday, he outlined that nightmare in a 15-page opening statement, which he read methodically over 40 minutes —

michael barbaro

Wow.

nicholas fandos

— to investigators gathered behind closed doors.

michael barbaro

And what does he say in this opening statement?

nicholas fandos

So Taylor begins a lot — like a lot of witnesses last week began. He describes two channels of foreign policy, an official channel and the kind of shadow or irregular channel, toward Ukraine. And he says basically, at first, these things are aligned. He told investigators, when I first arrived in Kiev in June and July, the actions of both the regular and the irregular channels of foreign policy served the same goal — a strong U.S.-Ukrainian partnership. But what he documents in copious notes and calls that he reconstructs and experiences that he has with other diplomats involved is a divergence of those two channels, a disintegration of the first one, essentially, in favor of the second. And he says, it became clear to me by August that the channels had diverged in their objectives.

michael barbaro

And what happened that led him to feel by August that there were two different sets of priorities here, that these things were no longer in line?

nicholas fandos

So it’s not long after Taylor arrives in Ukraine that it becomes increasingly clear to him that something funny is going on. At first, he hears from Ambassador Sondland that what the president really wants from the new Ukrainian leadership is a commitment to investigate his political opponents, the Bidens, and a conspiracy theory about Democratic and Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, and that to secure a visit to the White House, a visit that the Ukrainians badly want, will be contingent upon them publicly committing to conducting those investigations. As the summer goes on, he learns in July that, inexplicably and despite the guidance of the Defense Department and the State Department, the president has ordered the Office of Management and Budget to freeze the $400 million in security aid that is meant to be delivered to the Ukrainians. Taylor is completely alarmed by this. Remember, Taylor really knows the threat to Ukraine well, and he understands the power that this money has to help prop up its military. But what he doesn’t understand is why, at first, the money is being held up. And he describes, shortly after hearing that it’s going to be withheld, traveling to the northern border of Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are coming into contact with mounting hostile Russian-led forces, and thinking to himself, “I know this aid is being withheld, and these guys don’t.” And this is the face of the threat. More Ukrainians are going to die if the United States assistance does not come through.

michael barbaro

Wow.

nicholas fandos

And so he is really shaken by this and describes a series of meetings where he and others are trying to push to get it reinstated. And it’s around this time, Taylor testifies, he got on the phone with Sondland. And Sondland essentially said to him that everything, the White House meeting and the aid, were contingent upon the Ukrainians committing to these investigations. He said Sondland drew an analogy. He said, think of the president like a businessman. And when a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, the businessman asks that that person pay up before signing the check.” Now, Taylor is completely taken aback by this. In his view, the analogy doesn’t make any sense. Why would the Ukrainians owe President Trump anything?

michael barbaro

Right.

nicholas fandos

The security systems had been allocated. And its delivery made sense not just for the Ukrainians, but for the United States’s strategic interest. So this is a kind of key seam that, to him, exposes that to President Trump and those who are enabling him in this effort, it’s not about America’s national security. It’s just about these investigations. And that is what the president is after. That’s the sole goal of his foreign policy here, of this second channel that broke off from the first and seems to be, at this point, more or less the one that matters to the White House.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. So Nick, how do you find out about all this testimony on Tuesday?

nicholas fandos

So Tuesday was another long day outside of the House Intelligence Committee SCIF. But it was a little unusual in that not long after the testimony began, Democrats began to come out —

archived recording (eric swalwell) I’m not going to comment on what he said inside there.

nicholas fandos

— and, without giving specifics, essentially say on the record —

archived recording (andy levin) In my 10 short months in Congress, this is the — my most disturbing day in Congress so far.

nicholas fandos

This is a pretty remarkable thing we’ve just heard.

archived recording (ted lieu) And his opening statement is devastating to Donald Trump.

nicholas fandos

This may be the most significant testimony yet.

archived recording (ted lieu) It was very damning for the president.

nicholas fandos

And they all walk out with copies of his 15-page opening statement in their hands, but none of them will give it up to the press. So you know, I basically spent hours running around, working the phones, trying to get my hands on this piece of paper. And only by the early afternoon was I able to get a copy and start reading it and making sense of it.

michael barbaro

And Nick, is a lot of what these Democrats are so excited about, outside this secure room where you’re waiting on Tuesday, is that now the money, the military aid, is back in the picture? It’s now showing up in these hearings after a week where it had not been present.

nicholas fandos

I think that’s right. I mean, what they got with Bill Taylor today was somebody who had been there, had had a front seat to this whole story, come in and say, yeah, this thing in the middle, the military aid, the kind of — the worst possible thing in all of these allegations, that happened. That was true, and here’s why that matters. Democrats will tell you that any quid pro quo in this case is inappropriate. Even withholding a White House meeting is inappropriate and potentially impeachable from their point of view. But it’s the security aid, the withholding of a significant chunk of money that Republicans and Democrats both support, that they think is an obvious step for the United States to take for its own interests and to help its allies in Europe. That that would be withheld is, in political terms, kind of another magnitude of significance. And it’s the thing that Democrats think Republicans and, frankly, voters around the country are more likely to be convinced by. That hundreds of millions of dollars in hard military aid to fight a conflict against the Russians just resonates more with people. That’s a bigger kind of thing to be messing around with than a meeting at the White House, which most people don’t know why a meeting gets scheduled or doesn’t get scheduled. So by reinserting the military aid into the center of this, it reopens the possibility that this case could become more than a partisan exercise.

michael barbaro

But Nick, as you said, the whole impeachment inquiry began with a phone call between President Trump and the Ukrainian president, in which military aid appeared to be withheld in exchange for these investigations that Trump wants. What’s different about what happened on Tuesday that makes it such a big deal?

nicholas fandos

So what we had before was an anonymous allegation from a whistle-blower whose information didn’t seem to be firsthand. And in any case, the public doesn’t know who that whistle-blower is. They can’t evaluate that person’s claims. What we had on Tuesday was the top American diplomat in Ukraine, the guy who was supposed to be managing the relationship between the two countries, coming forward and testifying on the record, before Congress, that he saw a quid pro quo, that he saw the aid being withheld to extract political gain for the president of the United States. And he offered an authoritative, detailed and vivid account of how that went down. And that goes a long way. It’s not the whole case, but it goes a long way in establishing for Democrats and for this investigation that what they suspected, what was initially alleged, did, in fact, occur.

michael barbaro

So at this point, what was first an anonymous allegation delivered by a whistle-blower was just very much confirmed by an ambassador under oath, like you just said. So what more evidence do people on the impeachment inquiry committees need, do you think, to vote to impeach the president?

nicholas fandos

So I think what they want is to continue moving towards these kind of inner concentric circles. So if they’ve talked to the ambassador now, next they want to hear from the White House budget office to hear what order exactly came down from President Trump to suspend the aid. What did that sound like? What did people in the office think? What debate happened there? They want to know what was happening in the National Security Council, where advisers and aides to the president were listening to a lot of these calls and interactions in real time, not to mention talking with him, and will have their own accounts as to what was going down. So basically, if Taylor has sketched in this important part of the picture, they’re looking for additional witnesses that are kind of even closer to the action to fill in kind of flourishes and details that will either back up or disprove what he had to say. Because ultimately, what this is really about is about President Trump. You’re not impeaching these other officials around him. The House would vote to impeach President Trump. And they need to be able to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt in the Senate. And so what they’re really after is as precise and vivid a picture as possible of what President Trump was doing and saying and meaning as he took these actions.

michael barbaro

Right. They want the closest thing possible to direct, irrefutable evidence that the president himself said, withhold this money until I get my investigation. And it sounds like on Tuesday, they got a lot closer to that, but perhaps not all the way.

nicholas fandos

That’s right, and that’s why the investigation will keep grinding on.

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michael barbaro

Nick, thank you very much.

nicholas fandos

Glad to be with you again. Happy to do it.

[phone hanging up]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (recep tayyip erdogan) [SPEAKING TURKISH]

michael barbaro

On Tuesday, Turkey and Russia announced that both countries would take joint control over northeast Syria, a major victory for Russia that expands its influence at the expense of the U.S. and Kurdish forces. The Times reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted Russia to play a bigger role in the Middle East.

archived recording (vladimir putin) [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]

michael barbaro