michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: The whistle-blower complaint at the center of the impeachment inquiry is released as the Trump administration official who had refused to turn it over testifies before Congress. The latest from Capitol Hill. It’s Friday, September 27. Julie?

julie davis

Yes, I’m here.

michael barbaro

Hey.

julie davis

Hey.

archived recording (kenneth moton) Good morning. I’m Kenneth Moton. archived recording (janai norman) And I’m Janai Norman. Here are the top-five things to know this Thursday. Number one, the impeachment inquiry in Washington.

michael barbaro

So how does Thursday begin?

julie davis

So Thursday begins with everyone anticipating possibly seeing what is in this whistle-blower complaint.

archived recording (kenneth moton) A whistle-blower complaint about President Trump’s phone call to Ukraine is expected to be declassified and released today.

julie davis

The day before, we had all gotten to see a copy of a version of a transcript of a call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, and we knew that the whistle-blower complaint was related to that call.

michael barbaro

Julie Davis is the congressional editor at The Times.

julie davis

But it was also clear that there was more to the complaint than just that call, and we were all waiting to see whether it would be released and what it would say.

archived recording We start with a Fox News alert, the explosive whistle-blower complaint declassified overnight. And in just a few hours, the Director of National Intelligence will have to answer to lawmakers about that report.

julie davis

When we woke up Thursday morning, everyone was anticipating a big hearing that was going to take place on Capitol Hill —

archived recording Soon we will hear what Maguire has to say, but there are questions about what we will hear from him. How far can the D.N.I. go in an open session?

julie davis

— where the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who was the official who was in possession of this whistle-blower complaint but had withheld it from Congress was going to come and testify. And as it turned out a few moments before the hearing began —

archived recording We’ve got breaking news as we come on the air in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Just moments ago —

julie davis

— the Intelligence Committee sent out the unclassified version of the complaint.

michael barbaro

O.K., so tell me about this document.

julie davis

So the document is a pretty long memo. It’s very detailed and has a lot of legislative citations in it. My first impression was that this was a person who really knew what they were doing and was being very careful about the way that they were laying out this episode that they’re recounting. The second thing was as a reporter, to me it really felt like an investigative document, like someone had done a lot of digging and cross referencing and talking to people, talking to his colleagues to try to figure out what was actually going on here, and he had pieced together a pretty compelling and pretty damning picture of what he is alleging the president and the president’s team has been up to when it comes to their interactions with Ukraine.

michael barbaro

So would you actually read from it?

julie davis

Sure. So it’s addressed to Chairman Burr and Chairman Schiff, who are the Senate and House intelligence committee chairmen. And he writes, “I am reporting an urgent concern in accordance with the procedures outlined in 50 U.S. Code section 3033(k)(5)(A). This letter is UNCLASSIFIED” — in all caps — “when separated from the attachment.”

michael barbaro

It’s pretty formal.

julie davis

It’s very formal, and I’ll just stop here to say it’s written in such a way that you can tell that this person is being careful to make it very difficult for the administration to try to withhold or somehow suppress what it is that he’s trying to complain about.

michael barbaro

What do you mean?

julie davis

There’s a bullet point a little bit further down on the second page where it says “if a classification marking is applied retroactively, I believe it is incumbent upon the classifying authority to explain why such a marking was applied and to which specific information it pertains.” It’s almost like he’s talking to whatever official might be asked go back and classify — that is to say strike out or redact certain sections of this and saying, hey, buddy, you better make sure that there is a legal reason that you’re able to do that because I am trying to make sure that people see what I have to say.

michael barbaro

He’s reaching out to a future kind of censor within the Trump administration saying don’t do that.

julie davis

Certainly seems like that, yeah.

michael barbaro

O.K., so I wonder if you can resume your reading.

julie davis

So I’ll go back to the first page. He says, “In the course of my official duties, I’ve received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

michael barbaro

That’s a lot of information packed into a few sentences.

julie davis

Right. And he goes on. “Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort. It is routine for U.S. officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and analysis. I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.” So then, after that sort of introduction, the complaint gets into this July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky with which we are now fairly familiar, but he offers some new information about the call that we didn’t previously know. So he writes, “Based on my understanding, there were approximately a dozen White House officials who listened to the call, a mixture of policy officials and duty officers in the White House Situation Room, as is customary. The officials I spoke with told me that participation in the call had not been restricted in advance because everyone expected it would be a routine call with a foreign leader.” And this is the point where the whistle-blower turns from the conversation itself to the aftermath of the call. “In the days following the phone call,” he says, “I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to, quote, unquote, ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced, as is customary by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.” He writes, “White House officials told me they were, quote, unquote, ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials. Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”

michael barbaro

So if this complaint is to be believed, the people in this room — the dozen or so people who were listening in on the president’s call to Ukrainian president Zelensky very quickly interpreted what they were hearing to be something quite serious and something that needed to be restricted, not because of the national security content but because it was so politically sensitive.

julie davis

That’s right. At least some of them felt that they had just listened to a conversation that was highly inappropriate and that it would be a big problem if it ever got out. And so they took actions to make sure, essentially, that it wouldn’t.

michael barbaro

Although what we now know is that, of course, a bunch of people went to the whistle-blower and said even though this thing has been specially stored and kind of hidden, we need to tell you about it.

julie davis

Right. I mean, one of the mysteries after looking at this complaint is you really want to know more about these conversations that happened between the whistle-blower and the White House officials he talks about. Clearly there was a group of people, whether White House officials or other people in the administration, who heard or saw elements of this episode and were profoundly concerned by it, and they all had conversations about it. And ultimately this is the one person who decided to come forward. And interestingly, the whistle-blower says later on in an appendix of the complaint that this is not the first time that information like this has been handled this way. He says, “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was” — and he puts this in quotes — ”‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive rather than national security sensitive information.”

michael barbaro

So the pattern being that the president has freewheeling, potentially inappropriate conversations with foreign leaders and then locks them away, not for the normal reasons but just because they may be embarrassing.

julie davis

Right, and the idea being that there are multiple officials around him, potentially including White House lawyers, who have gotten into this habit of, O.K., this is how you treat a conversation like this. We just put it in the codeword-level system so that others inside the government who might be alarmed by this or might see something wrong with this don’t ever see it.

michael barbaro

Julie, is there anything else of note in this whistle-blower’s complaint?

julie davis

The final allegation in the complaint is kind of a broad one about the ways in which the people around President Trump sort of acted on their own to reinforce this essentially threat that he was making or pressure campaign that he was trying to impose on the Ukrainian president. So he talks about how he had learned that in mid-May President Trump instructs Vice President Mike Pence to cancel a planned trip that he had to go to Ukraine to attend Zelensky’s inauguration. He also says that it was, quote, unquote, “made clear” to people around President Trump that he didn’t want to meet with President Zelensky until he saw him choose to act in office, essentially until he started doing what it was that Trump had asked him to do. And so he writes, “I do not know how this guidance was communicated or by whom,” but he essentially is suggesting that this was all of a piece, this was all sort of a coordinated campaign directed by the president and also just initiated by people around him who knew what he wanted to have happen to essentially make it clear to Zelensky that there was something that President Trump wanted, and if he didn’t get it, the relationship would suffer.

michael barbaro

The allegation being that the president enlisted lots of people around him in the federal branch of the government to try to get this favor done for him.

julie davis

Right, and that he had made it so clear in so many different ways that, in some cases, some of these officials may have taken it upon themselves to do what it was that they knew the president wanted.

michael barbaro

So how did this complaint end up getting from the whistle-blower’s hands to all of us, to the public on Thursday morning?

julie davis

Well, that saga was the subject of this hearing on Thursday morning on Capitol Hill before the House Intelligence Committee, which had been trying for weeks to get a copy of this complaint and been stonewalled. The complaint ended up coming out just as the hearing began, but many of the people in that hearing room were very focused on why it had taken so long to get the complaint in the first place.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. So Julie, tell us about this Intelligence Committee hearing in the House.

julie davis

So the hearing begins with the chairman of the committee, Adam Schiff, giving this really outraged speech —

archived recording (adam schiff) Yesterday we were presented with the most graphic evidence yet that the president of the United States has betrayed his oath of office —

julie davis

— about what the allegations are.

archived recording (adam schiff) — for yesterday we were presented with a record of a call between the president of the United States and the president of Ukraine in which the president — our president — sacrificed our national security and our Constitution for his personal political benefit.

julie davis

All the Democrats are chomping at the bit to have a chance to question Director Maguire about why they haven’t gotten to see this complaint about what the underlying conduct was.

archived recording (adam schiff) Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you will give today shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? archived recording (joseph maguire) I do archived recording (adam schiff) Thank you. You may be seated. Now, the first place you went was to the White House. Am I to understand that from your opening statement? It wasn’t to the Department of Justice? The first place you went for a second opinion was to the White House?

julie davis

They really are going after Maguire on the procedure by which he handled this whistle-blower complaint, essentially asking him why he shared the complaint and went to the White House and the Department of Justice first before coming to Congress, which is what’s laid out in the law.

archived recording (adam schiff) Let me ask you this. Do you think it’s appropriate that you go to a department run by someone who is the subject of the complaint to get advice — or who is a subject of the complaint or implicated in the complaint — for advice as to whether you should provide that complaint to Congress? Did that conflict of interest concern you?

julie davis

And essentially what they’re saying is — you had this complaint that had wrongdoing alleged on the part of the president and participation on the part of the attorney general. So then why would you go to the White House and the Department of Justice to ask permission to share that when they’re essentially the subject of this complaint?

archived recording (adam schiff) I’m just asking if the conflict of interest concerned you? archived recording (joseph maguire) Well, sir, I have to work with what I’ve got, and that is the Office of Legal Counsel within the executive branch.

michael barbaro

And how does Maguire respond to these very pointed questions of why did you first consult with, essentially, the accused about how to handle a whistle-blower complaint about the accused?

julie davis

Maguire is really trying to play it very carefully here.

archived recording (joseph maguire) It was not stonewalling. I didn’t receive direction from anybody. I was just trying to work through the process and the law the way it is written. I have to comply with the way the law is, not the way some people would like it to be. And if I could do otherwise, it would have been much more convenient for me.

julie davis

It is pretty clear from the sequence of events that Maguire actually wanted to handle this whistle-blower complaint in the right way, and yet the process ended up being very dissatisfying to members of Congress, and they feel like they’ve been stiffed. So what he says is repeatedly he had to follow the law.

archived recording (joseph maguire) It did appear that it has executive privilege.

julie davis

There was a matter, he says, of executive privilege here because this involved the president.

archived recording (joseph maguire) If it does have executive privilege, it is the White House that determines that.

julie davis

And so even though there is a statute that says an intelligence whistle-blower complaint has got to be brought to Capitol Hill, has got to be shared with the Intelligence Committee, he is saying there was this issue that involved the president, and it necessitated that I operate under the rules governing executive privilege.

archived recording (joseph maguire) And until executive privilege is determined and cleared, I did not have the authority to be able to send that forward to the committee.

julie davis

Who is in charge of that? The White House and the Department of Justice.

archived recording (joseph maguire) I believe that this matter is unprecedented.

michael barbaro

Right. He kept using the word unprecedented.

archived recording (joseph maguire) It is unprecedented. It is probably unprecedented. This case is unique and unprecedented.

michael barbaro

And I got the sense that he was a little bit exasperated and trying to explain, look, there are a set of rules around whistle-blowers, but nobody wrote those rules thinking that the whistle would be blown on the president.

julie davis

That’s right, that this was essentially a choice that he was not going to get to make on his own.

archived recording (joseph maguire) I am not political, I am not partisan, and I did not look to be sitting here as the acting director of national intelligence. I thought that there were, perhaps, other people who would be best and more qualified to do that.

michael barbaro

He also seems authentically a bit wary of this whole process and a few times says I’ve been in this job for just a few weeks.

archived recording (joseph maguire) I am the acting D.N.I., and I was still using Garmin to get to work. My life would have been a heck of a lot simpler without becoming the most famous man in the United States. archived recording Don’t doubt that at all, sir. My question, sir —

michael barbaro

It was this sense of give me a break.

julie davis

Right. Also a sense of, I don’t have anything to do with this. I mean, it is pretty clear from his testimony that he thinks that the matters that are raised in this complaint are a huge deal, and he does not want to be associated with them. And as the members of Congress try to get him to essentially admit some sort of complicity or that he knew something, he keeps reminding them —

archived recording (joseph maguire) My first day on the job was Friday the 16th of August, and I think I set a new record in the administration for being subpoenaed before any — archived recording Yeah, you had a heck of a first week, didn’t you, sir? archived recording (joseph maguire) Got that much going for me, sir.

julie davis

I’ve been the D.N.I. for six weeks.

archived recording As you know, the phone call happened on July 25th of this year. At that time, the D.N.I. was Dan Coats.

julie davis

And at one point he’s even asked if he was told by his predecessor, Dan Coats, who was the director of national intelligence right before he came on board about this July 25 call or about the whistle-blower complaint.

archived recording Did you discuss the July 25 call or the whistle-blower complaint with D.N.I. Coats?

julie davis

And he essentially says —

archived recording (joseph maguire) I wouldn’t have taken the job if I did. No, sir.

julie davis

— if I’d known, I would not have taken this job.

michael barbaro

Right. This is sort of the acting director appointment of a lifetime.

julie davis

Right, and he seems to appreciate the irony there.

michael barbaro

So what happens on the Republican side?

julie davis

The Republicans are pretty much unanimously indignant about this.

archived recording We’ve learned the following. The complaint relied on hearsay evidence provided by the whistle-blower. The inspector general did not know the contents of the phone call at issue. The inspector general found the whistle-blower displayed arguable political bias against Trump.

julie davis

And they are coming to the president’s defense that this is a fishing expedition on the part of the Democrats.

archived recording I want to congratulate the Democrats on the rollout of their latest information-warfare operation against the president.

julie davis

And they essentially are saying the Democrats have been trying for months and months.

archived recording This operation began with media reports from the prime instigators of the Russia-collusion hoax.

julie davis

And they couldn’t make that case, so now they’re kind of grasping for straws on this.

archived recording So there you go. If the whistle-blower operation doesn’t work out, the Democrats and their media assets can always drum up something else. archived recording (adam schiff) I thank you, Director. We are adjourned archived recording (joseph maguire) Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

michael barbaro

Julie, what do you feel came out of this hearing?

julie davis

I think that what members of Congress got out of this is a real sense that the whistle-blower complaint is a serious thing that the intelligence community took very seriously. They’re still angry about the fact that it took them a few weeks and a lot of machinations to get a hold of it, but they now have the complaint. So it’s almost as if this hearing kind of puts a pin in that, and now they move on to, O.K., we have this information. What are we actually going to do with it?

michael barbaro

And what are they going to do with it?

julie davis

Well, after the hearing Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said that —

archived recording I think the complaint gives us a pretty good roadmap of allegations that we need to investigate.

julie davis

— the complaint was going to be a roadmap for the impeachment inquiry, essentially.

archived recording (adam schiff) There is a whole host of people apparently who have knowledge of these events. We’ll do our best to identify those. We’re obviously going to be bringing the whistle-blower in.

julie davis

This is now going to form the backbone of their investigation. There had been discussions among Democrats about should they have a big, expansive inquiry that would wrap in the Mueller report and potential obstruction of justice. I think after today, those questions are pretty much put to rest in the eyes of Democrats. They see this Ukraine matter as the central element of an impeachment case against President Trump, and that is the road they’re going to go down. So we are going to see them try to get access to the whistle-blower. We’re going to see them try to question the officials that are referenced in this complaint where he talks about people who are concerned who came to him and shared these accounts that were troubling, and that’s going to be the entry point for them to potentially draft articles of impeachment.

[music]

michael barbaro

Julie, thank you very much.

julie davis

Thanks, Michael.

michael barbaro

The Times reports that the whistle-blower, who remains anonymous, is a C.I.A. officer who once worked at the White House.

archived recording (donald trump) I want to know, who’s the person that gave the whistle-blower — who’s the person that gave the whistle-blower the information, because that’s worse than a spy.

michael barbaro

On Thursday during a private meeting with aides at the United Nations, President Trump compared the whistle-blower’s sources to spies, according to audio obtained by the Los Angeles Times, and went on to seemingly threaten both the whistle-blower and his sources.

archived recording (donald trump) You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart, right, with spies and treason? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now. [LAUGHTER]

michael barbaro

During a news conference on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the impeachment process would be methodical, open minded, and fair.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) There is no rush to judgment, and in some ways we are a jury open to what might be exculpatory or not. But every day the sadness grows because the disregard for our Constitution that the president has becomes more clear.

michael barbaro