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The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: Latest Updates The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: What Happened Today
(about 3 hours later)
The Trump administration has started to circle the wagons by formally refusing to cooperate with investigations led by Democrats that could pave the way to impeachment. But the White House’s strategy could prove risky, especially if Democrats are successful in characterizing it as an effort to obstruct justice. American diplomats who pushed to end the White House’s freeze on security funding for Ukraine were told to play it down when the money was released. “Keep moving, people, nothing to see here …” one State Department official wrote in an email obtained by The Times.
In a letter sent on Tuesday evening, the top lawyer for the White House said that the president and his administration will not participate in ongoing investigations run by House Democratic leaders. The letter also dismissed Democrats’ efforts to gather information about Mr. Trump’s dealings with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as partisan and illegitimate. What’s next: After a temporary pause for the Jewish High Holy Days, the House committee chairmen leading the inquiry plan to issue new subpoenas for witness testimony and written records as soon as Thursday. Democrats still want to talk to the whistle-blowers, too.
The standoff sets up a clash between two branches of government, and forces Democrats to consider how and whether to move forward with impeachment. This morning’s episode of “The Daily” followed Representative Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat, as she went to three forums in her mid-Michigan district — including one at the East Lansing pie bakery where I worked the 5 a.m. shift in high school! Her takeaway: Many voters want an investigation that feels deliberate. “There’s no need to come out of a meeting where you’ve heard some new testimony and just start talking to the press about how this seals the deal for you, and you’re done,” she said.
Mr. Trump on Wednesday continued to dismiss the whistle-blower’s claims at the heart of the impeachment investigation, saying on Twitter that he was owed an apology by the whistle-blower. To follow up on the episode, I called my colleague Emily Cochrane this afternoon just after she landed in San Antonio, where she was planning to cover a run of town-hall-style events with Republican members of Congress to see how Texans were responding to the inquiry.
— Zach Montague Emily, you wrote this week about what constituents in three New York congressional districts are saying about impeachment. Not everyone was cheering for it — many wanted to talk about other things. What was on their minds?
Read more: White House Declares War on Impeachment Inquiry, Claiming Effort to Undo Trump’s Election With the Democratic voters I spoke to, they were curious about impeachment and glad their members of Congress endorsed it. They wanted to rip the Band-Aid off, but they also wanted to know how policy was going to get done. Is there going to be some kind of gun reform? What are you doing to combat climate change? There had been a push to cancel this congressional break. But House Democratic leadership pushed back, saying that people needed to get home to explain impeachment to their constituents and assure them that other work was getting done.
American diplomats who had pushed for the Trump administration to restore security funding to Ukraine were advised by the White House to play down the release of the money when it was finally approved, documents show. Max Rose, a Democrat who represents a somewhat conservative district, had been on the fence on impeachment. He used his town hall to announce his endorsement of the inquiry, and then got exactly zero questions about it. Why do you think that was?
“Keep moving, people, nothing to see here …” Brad Freden, the State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary overseeing issues in Europe and Eurasia, wrote in a Sept. 12 email obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Rose’s town hall was about tolls and the commute from Staten Island to Manhattan. Even with climate change, there were questions about nuclear energy in the district. This is a huge moment in Washington, but the government still has to be funded, and local issues still resonate more. If you have one question, you’re more likely going to pick one about home.
He said the National Security Council would not publicly announce that $141 million in State Department assistance was being restored after being held up in what the White House described as a normal review. This week we saw growing public support for the impeachment investigation, including a Fox News poll released tonight that showed just over half of voters wanting Mr. Trump removed from office. This afternoon I stopped by the office of David Leonhardt, a Times opinion columnist here in Washington, to ask him what the numbers meant, and how much they shape the thinking of the White House and Congress.
The money — $391 million in funding — is now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump withheld the funds as part of his pressure campaign on Ukraine. David, you wrote last week about how President Trump is losing what you called the “battle for public opinion.” Should we be paying attention to that this early in the process?
— Lara Jakes We should care about the polling because impeachment is an inherently political process. It’s not like a murder trial where the only opinions that matter are that of the 12 jurors. If you look at history, Richard Nixon lost his job because he lost public support, and Republicans decided they needed to abandon him. Bill Clinton kept his job because he kept public support.
Read more: ‘Nothing to See Here’: Diplomats Urged to Play Down Release of Ukraine Aid What’s the best way to track public sentiment?
For the first time, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called for Mr. Trump to be impeached. It’s early, so we should be careful about drawing sweeping conclusions. And you should almost never care about any single poll. Pay attention to aggregates of polls.
During a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Biden, a presidential candidate, said that Mr. Trump committed impeachable acts in the campaign to get Ukraine to investigate some of his political rivals, including Mr. Biden. As the impeachment investigation goes on, we should care about these polls because politicians are reacting to them. Polls are snapshots that they pay attention to, because their jobs ultimately depend on it. But other forms of expression matter. In the fight over Obamacare, town halls, rallies and phone calls to offices really affected members of Congress.
“To preserve our Constitution, our democracy, our basic integrity, he should be impeached,” Mr. Biden said, adding: “We have to remember that impeachment isn’t only about what the president’s done. It’s about the threat the president poses to the nation if allowed to remain in office.” How might Mr. Trump’s approval rating influence his thinking?
Read on: Joe Biden Calls for Trump’s Impeachment His approval rating is more important for him than impeachment polls. Impeachment polls can turn on how a question is phrased: whether people think impeachment means removal or doesn’t mean removal, and so on. Approval ratings are more consistent. We’ve got them going back through his entire presidency. The FiveThirtyEight average shows he’s lost about 1.5 points in the past few weeks. That’s small but meaningful, especially because it was already pretty low. The impeachment polling matters partly because it could end up being a preview of where his approval rating goes, either positively or negatively.
As The Times’s Nicholas Fandos reported on Tuesday, a White House official who listened to Mr. Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s leader described it as “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security,” according to a memo written by the whistle-blower at the center of the Ukraine scandal who spoke to the official. Joe Biden called today for Mr. Trump to be impeached. While other Democratic candidates have long supported impeachment, Mr. Biden, who is at the center of the inquiry, has been more cautious.
The White House official was “visibly shaken by what had transpired,” the whistle-blower, a C.I.A. officer, wrote in his memo, one day after Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Zelensky. Why did Mr. Biden wait? The Times looked back to the impeachments of Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of which he took part in as a senator, and found that he had consistently urged restraint and expressed discomfort with removing a president from office.
A palpable sense of concern had already taken hold among at least some in the White House that the call had veered well outside the bounds of traditional diplomacy, the officer wrote. My colleague Elizabeth Williamson wrote about Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel who wrote the extraordinary eight-page letter to Congress calling the impeachment investigation “highly partisan and unconstitutional.” With his memo, the low-profile Mr. Cipollone emerged as the boss of the White House impeachment team, Elizabeth writes.
“The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official’s view, the president had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own re-election bid in 2020,” the C.I.A. officer wrote. The Trump re-election campaign has poured over $700,000 into Facebook ads about impeachment, Axios reports. Curiously, the No. 2 spender on impeachment-related ads is a Wisconsin-based retailer, Penzeys Spices, which has made a name for itself with anti-Trump marketing tactics.
Read more: Trump’s Ukraine Call Was ‘Crazy’ and ‘Frightening,’ Official Told Whistle-Blower The Impeachment Briefing is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weeknight.
President Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate people and issues of political concern to Mr. Trump, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Here’s a timeline of events since January.
A C.I.A. officer who was once detailed to the White House filed a whistle-blower complaint on Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Zelensky. Read the complaint.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in September that the House would open a formal impeachment proceeding in response to the whistle-blower’s complaint. Here’s how the impeachment process works.
House committees have issued subpoenas to the White House, the Defense Department, the budget office and other agencies for documents related to the impeachment investigation. Here’s the evidence that has been collected so far.