michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Over the weekend, reports of an unknown whistle-blower with unnamed complaints against the president turned into allegations that President Trump courted foreign interference from Ukraine to hurt his leading Democratic rival, Joe Biden. The president is calling it a “witch hunt” and saying it’s Biden who is engaged in corruption. Mike Schmidt on whether Ukraine is shaping up to be the Russia of 2020. It’s Monday, September 23. Mike, take me back to when you first learn about this whistle-blower complaint.

michael schmidt

So earlier this month, we started to hear that there was a whistle-blower that had some type of information, and that Capitol Hill was struggling to get their hands on it.

michael barbaro

O.K.

michael schmidt

And then last Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that that complaint came from someone in the intelligence community, and it involved contact between the president and a foreign leader.

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michael barbaro

So what’d you do?

michael schmidt

So we jumped on the story, because all of a sudden, hold on, there’s someone in the intelligence community that thinks that the president has done something so egregious that they are trying to get the word about this out somehow. What is it that the president could have done? What does it involve? What did he do that was so extreme that what appears to be a regular civil servant went so far as to file a whistle-blower complaint, which is very significant, on the person who leads the executive branch?

michael barbaro

So what do you find about this complaint?

michael schmidt

Well, what we learn about this complaint is that it had been made to someone known as the intelligence community inspector general, the I.C.I.G., in Washington lingo. He is the watchdog for the intelligence community. And we learn that he has looked at this allegation and found it credible, but despite that, he’s been unable to pass that information along to Congress, who he reports to on how he is policing and keeping a watch over the intelligence community.

michael barbaro

And why is he having trouble getting this whistle-blower complaint to Congress?

michael schmidt

The system is setup for whistle-blowers to come forward about government wrongdoing, and for that information to go to an inspector general, and for it to be reported to Congress. But what happens if it involves the president of the United States? And what happens if it involves potentially privileged conversations the president of the United States was having? What had happened is that the I.C.I.G. had been unsure how to deal with this, had looked at this and said, uh-oh, what do I do? — and had consulted with the Justice Department. And the Justice Department had said, no, you cannot give this to Congress. Technically, the I.C.I.G. actually is part of the executive branch, and by extension, works for the president. And the Trump administration is saying, hey, executive branch employee, you can’t do anything with that. You work for us, and we’re telling you no. So at this point, we know that the complaint involves the president, a conversation he had with a foreign leader, and something that bothered the intelligence community. And those three things are a potentially huge deal for any president. So we dig in as hard as we can to try and find out any little bit more we can about what is in this complaint, and what it relates directly to. And in the process of that, we learned something interesting.

michael barbaro

Which is what?

michael schmidt

It involves Ukraine.

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michael barbaro

And what is it about Ukraine that starts to signal what this conversation might have been about?

michael schmidt

So there are two pretty interesting data points. The first is that for several months, the United States, through Trump, has been withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that the Ukrainians say that they need to protect their own sovereignty and protect themselves from the Russians. And that brings us to the second data point about Ukraine. And that’s that in the past several months, as the president and his surrogates have moved their attention towards attacking Joe Biden —

archived recording (chris cuomo) We happen to have the man in the middle tonight.

michael schmidt

— the president’s supporters, specifically his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani —

archived recording (chris cuomo) Good to have you on the show. archived recording (rudy giuliani) I’m glad I’m on tonight, because what you just said is totally erroneous.

michael schmidt

— have been pushing the notion that —

archived recording (rudy giuliani) When Biden got the prosecutor fired, the new prosecutor, who Biden approved — you don’t get to approve a prosecutor in a foreign country unless something fishy is going on.

michael schmidt

— the presidential candidate Joe Biden has corrupt ties to the Ukraine and needs to be investigated because of that.

archived recording (rudy giuliani) The new prosecutor dropped a case not just on Biden’s kid and the crooked company that Biden’s kid worked for, Burisma, that was done as a matter of record in October of 2016, after the guy got tanked.

michael schmidt

What Giuliani has tried to exploit is the fact that Biden’s son Hunter was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company that has been accused of wrongdoing. And Giuliani has essentially been saying that when Biden was vice president, he pushed to have a prosecutor in Ukraine fired in order to prevent the prosecutor from looking into allegations related to his son’s business dealings there.

archived recording (rudy giuliani) And you won’t cover it. And you want to cover some ridiculous charge that I urged the Ukrainian government to investigate corruption. Well, I did, and I’m proud of it. archived recording (chris cuomo) Then it’s not a ridiculous allegation. You just admitted it. archived recording (rudy giuliani) It’s a ridiculous allegation. archived recording (chris cuomo) You just admitted it.

michael barbaro

And that, of course, would be in the service of embarrassing and hurting Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.

michael schmidt

They don’t make any bones about it. They’re out to defeat him in 2020, and are fairly open about the fact that they are trying to hurt his candidacy. They see him as potentially the biggest threat to a Trump re-election.

michael barbaro

And Mike, is there any legitimacy, as best we can tell, to what Giuliani is saying about Biden’s son and what action Biden took?

michael schmidt

From what we can see, there is no evidence to back up these claims by Giuliani. And in fact, it wasn’t Joe Biden’s decision to have this prosecutor removed. Many world leaders in organizations were calling for this prosecutor to be ousted.

michael barbaro

O.K., so given those data points of the things we already knew about Ukraine, how does it connect back to this whistle-blower complaint?

michael schmidt

Well, we’re starting to wonder whether the fact that the Ukrainians wanted this money, that Trump was holding back on it, and that Trump wanted the Ukrainians to investigate this was at the heart of what the complaint was about. And then we learned that on July 25, Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. On eight different occasions on that call, Trump told Zelensky that he should investigate these allegations and share the findings with Giuliani.

michael barbaro

And do we know if the money that Ukraine wanted from the Trump administration, whether that came up during the call?

michael schmidt

We don’t know whether it came up, but we do know that earlier this month, the Trump administration released that money to the Ukrainians.

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michael barbaro

Mike, I just want to piece this together. You have laid out a scenario in which President Trump calls the president of Ukraine and presses him to investigate his political opponent’s son, and all the while, it would very much be in the air that he controls $250 million that that president of Ukraine wants while he is proposing that that president of Ukraine basically do him a political favor.

michael schmidt

Correct.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. O.K., so that’s more or less where the story stands on Sunday.

michael schmidt

Yes. And then —

archived recording Mr. President, Mr. President —

michael schmidt

Trump comes out and addresses the media about the allegation.

archived recording (donald trump) We had a great conversation. The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely —

michael schmidt

He says that he had a conversation with the president of Ukraine.

archived recording (donald trump) — the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the — the corruption already in the Ukraine, and Ukraine —

michael schmidt

Brought up Joe Biden.

archived recording (donald trump) But what he said is that he wouldn’t give — I think it was billions of dollars to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was looking at his son and his son’s company, the company that his son worked with, and that’s a very dishonest thing.

michael schmidt

And believes that there is real wrongdoing that is not being examined.

michael barbaro

So the president acknowledges having a conversation with the president of Ukraine in which he complains about Biden, complains about Biden’s son, accuses the two of them of corruption. I have to say, for those who believe the president pressured Zelensky to investigate his rival, it certainly feels like Trump is giving them a fair bit to work with.

michael schmidt

Correct. The president appears to have given his political opponents a fresh avenue to go down as they try and investigate him.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

michael schmidt

Trump often wants to get institutions, whether it’s the F.B.I., or Justice Department, or, in this case, a foreign country, to investigate his rivals and for his rivals to be tarnished by that investigation. And to me, it fit a pattern that we had seen with him. And here he is doing it again, but at the same time, giving the Democrats an entirely new issue to push in their effort to prove that he’s corrupt.

michael barbaro

I’m struck by the timing. Because you mentioned that this phone call that President Trump had with the president of Ukraine happened in late July, so that’s right after the Mueller report comes out, which is a yearslong investigation into meddling in an American election by a foreign government. And yet, here we are.

michael schmidt

The call occurs the day after Mueller testifies. At that point, it’s pretty clear that the president is going to pay no real political consequences for the contacts that his campaign had with Russia during the election, including meeting with the Russians about dirt that the Russians claimed to have on Hillary Clinton. So why, if the president, in his own mind, thinks he survives the Mueller investigation, why wouldn’t he continue that behavior if he hasn’t had to face a consequence for it?

michael barbaro

So where do things stand now?

archived recording We are just getting a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on this most recent news with regards to the whistle-blower report.

michael schmidt

So Democrats see this as the gravest abuse of power that Trump has done since coming to office.

archived recording Here is what she says: “If the president has done what has been alleged, then he is stepping into a dangerous minefield with serious repercussions for his administration and our democracy.”

michael schmidt

They believe there’s a freshness to this, and they can use this as a new way of investigating the president and hopefully getting that to resonate with the public in ways that Russia did not.

michael barbaro

And Mike, why would this be the gravest?

michael schmidt

In the case of Russia, Russia appears to have been the one reaching out to the Trump campaign to help them. In this case, the sitting president of the United States may have been using his diplomatic power to pressure a foreign country to do work for him that would benefit his campaign. It’s a proactive use of power that we have not seen before. The other thing is that when the 2016 contacts between Russians and Trump associates happened, Trump was not president. He had no presidential powers to push the Russians on different things. In this instance, he is the president, and he’s sort of mixing together diplomacy and political operations that would benefit himself.

michael barbaro

Mike, in the end, how important is it to what happens next in this case whether or not this conversation that President Trump is now acknowledging happened, encouraging Ukraine to investigate Biden’s son, that it ever involved a discussion about money, that it was a quid pro quo?

michael schmidt

Well, on one hand, it would be hugely important, because it would show the quid pro quo and what would be given in exchange for the help. There would be a, hey, you do this, I’ll give you this. But on the other hand, why does it matter? If you’re the president of the United States and you’re asking a far smaller country that’s dependent on you to do something, isn’t money essentially already on the line? Isn’t it sort of implicit that if you’re speaking to the president of the United States and he’s asking you to do something, that you could face a financial consequence or benefit because of that?

michael barbaro

I wonder if this is starting to feel like the 2020 version of 2016, where Republicans will say that what should really be investigated is Biden, and Democrats will say no, no, no, what should be investigated is Trump’s conduct.

michael schmidt

Yeah. In 2016, it was all about Trump saying that Hillary Clinton was corrupt, and the Democrats saying, but look at you. And here we are again, but in Clinton’s place, we have Biden. And we have the Republicans saying, why isn’t anyone looking into Biden’s corruption? And it’s this sort of split-screen redux of what we saw. And in the coming months, you can see the political argument breaking down in the same fashion that they did in 2016.

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michael barbaro

Thank you, Michael.

michael schmidt

Thanks for having me.

michael barbaro

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

archived recording (joe biden) Here’s what I know. I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president.

michael barbaro

Over the weekend, during a campaign event in Iowa, Joe Biden addressed Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, calling it an abuse of power.

archived recording (joe biden) Why is he on the phone with a foreign leader trying to intimidate a foreign leader, if that’s what happened? That’s appears what happened. Trump’s doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum, and he’s using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.

michael barbaro

Asked about the allegations of wrongdoing made by Giuliani and Trump, Biden said there was no truth to them.

archived recording (joe biden) Everybody looked at this, and everybody who’s looked at it said there’s nothing there.

michael barbaro