That’s A Wrap!
On Thursday, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified before the House Intelligence Committee about a whistleblower complaint that has alleged that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Committee members questioned Maguire for more than three hours. Many of the questions focused on process — how and why the whistleblower complaint was initially not turned over to Congress. There was also discussion of some of the allegations of the whistleblower’s letter itself, including whether the White House tried to hide records of the president’s conversation with Zelensky or asked for foreign assistance in a U.S. election. Maguire also testified that he doesn’t know who the whistleblower is but that he thinks he or she is acting in good faith.
This is a rapidly evolving story and there is still a lot we don’t know, including the identity of the whistleblower, but here are some headlines and key takeaways from the live blog crew:
- Micah: Whistleblower Complaint Says Trump Abused Office And Tried To Cover Up Ukraine Call
subhead: Also, the acting Director of National Intelligence testified. - Amelia: Maguire Defends His Handling Of An “Unprecedented” Complaint, But Won’t Say If He Talked to Trump
- Lee: Maguire Dodges The Most Important Questions: Is There Truth To The Whistleblower Complaint, And Did The President Try To Squelch That Complaint? Everything Else Is Commentary.
- Nathaniel: Democrats Stir The Pot In Hearing — And Maybe That’s All They Need To Do
- Chad: Whistleblower Complaint Makes The Maguire Hearing A Footnote On A Historic Day
- Chris: Democrats Try To Establish A Cover-Up, Save Substance Of The Complaint For Final Minutes
- Clare: Trump’s Director Of National Intelligence Grilled By Democrats Over ‘Unprecedented’ Whistleblower Complaint
The hearing is adjourned.
During Maguire’s testimony, Pelosi told reporters that she thought that by not turning over the whistleblower complaint to Congress sooner, the DNI did break the law. “The law is very clear: The DNI shall convey the complaint to the intelligence committees — not the whole Congress — to the intelligence committee. Carefully balanced to protect our intelligence and to protect the whistleblower.”
Maguire is kind of flailing with his answers, which gives the impression that Schiff’s questions having real punch behind them.
Schiff’s closing questions — asking Maguire about each whistleblower accusation in turn — strike me as much more effective than 80 percent of what has been asked in the hearing so far.
Things are moving fast here, and new information has been coming out quickly — I agree with Chad that this hearing is us seeing Democrats try to figure out which avenues are worthwhile to chase down and which aren’t. Of course, not all of that makes for riveting TV, but I think at least part of this is laying the groundwork for further investigation.
Schiff is getting some good (from Democrats’ POV) quotes from Maguire right now. Maguire, maybe in a slip (?), agreed that parts of the whistleblower complaint should be investigated.
Usually I say that these hearings we cover won’t change anything. While I don’t think a lot of people who don’t already have firm opinions are watching this live, I’m not sure that will be true this time. This story is moving so fast, and I agree with Amelia that the Democrats may have done a good job in this hearing of painting the administration’s actions as sketchy and pointing down paths for further investigation. That could frame the way the media narrative solidifies.
Top-line thought as this winds down: DNI Maguire is acting and testifying as if these are normal times. These are not normal times.
I think Amelia’s final thoughts are smart. Coming into today, there were two potential cover-ups the Democrats were interested in, outside the allegations that Trump asked Ukraine to intervene to smear Joe Biden. One cover-up, according to the whistleblower’s allegation, was whether call logs were being marked as secret to hide them from those who could leak their concerning contents. The other was whether Maguire intentionally kept the complaint and IG report away from Congress to shield the president. Today showed there isn’t much fuel in the latter line of inquiry. Democrats may disagree with Maguire’s decision, but proving it was politically motivated seems unlikely. (Similar to Comey’s decision to release Clinton’s letter days before Election Day in 2016!) So now Democrats will have to leave that strange dead end behind and concentrate more on the stuff that actually could move public opinion.
Big takeaways from this should
We’re getting close to the end here. Today’s hearing with Maguire involved a lot of stage-setting and not a lot of fireworks. But as it went on, I thought the Democrats did an increasingly good job of framing the process concerns (how the complaint was dealt with) in terms that people can understand — i.e., if the inspector general thought the allegations were credible and it involved something as serious as the president pressuring a foreign power to investigate a political rival, why didn’t you think Congress needed to see the complaint?
Going forward, I’m not sure how productive it will be to focus on whether Maguire did something wrong in his handling of the complaint, but I think overall the Democrats did a fairly good job with a witness who wasn’t really inclined to cooperate with them, especially the later questioners. And now the question is really who else the Democrats will be able to call to testify — Coats? Atkinson? Giuliani?
Important clarification that Schiff just got from Maguire. The DNI had said he hadn’t talked to anyone about Ukraine. That stood out to me given that he wouldn’t say earlier that he hadn’t talked to Trump about the whistleblower.
But Maguire just clarified to say he hasn’t talked to anyone about Ukraine about anything not involving this whistleblower complaint.
The hearing is wrapping up. The congresspeople have asked their questions, and now we’re getting a final word from Nunes and Schiff.
As this hearing begins to wrap up, I’m trying to think about what the takeaways from it will be on local newspapers and on local news broadcasts. I have to think that an exchange in which Maguire says in theory, any president soliciting help from a foreign power to interfere in a U.S. election would be troubling. I also have to think they’ll mention the fact Maguire has called this complaint “unprecedented” numerous times, as a way to explain his failure to turn over the complaint to Congress, as is typical. Aside from that, I think a continuing thread of this story will be how much Maguire deferred to the president and his lawyers in this matter. There’s a lot of surmising that Maguire talked to the president about this complaint, which think could be a factor that really lingers over all of this.
Rep. Krishnamoorthi getting at how calls are recorded/noted/transcribed with Maguire, which seems like a journalist’s approach: Ask basic questions that establish the mechanics of how something gets logged. That’s different than process, since mechanics can later be cited in order to understand the reliability of various documents.
The Democrats have spent a lot of time today trying to shore up Atkinson’s credibility. He’s slated to testify with Maguire before the Senate Intelligence Committee today — but behind closed doors.
Yeah, Amelia, I think a lot of people are going to read that exchange as at least suggesting that Maguire did talk to Trump about the whistleblower complaint.
Obviously, we don’t know though.
Maguire is refusing to say whether he talked to Trump about the complaint, saying anything he says to the president is confidential. Worth noting that earlier, he did say the president didn’t ask him to find out the whistleblower’s identity — but he won’t say he didn’t talk to the president.
Smart of Maloney to establish that Maguire hadn’t been on the job, suggesting that even if Maguire’s character is strong, Maguire was still trying to figure out how to get to work at the time the complaint came in.
Yeah, Micah, with all due respect to Maguire, if only a third of Americans are familiar with the whole Ukraine drama, I wonder if even a quarter know who Maguire is.
This quote is illuminating if you’re trying to figure out the Democrats’ approach to Maguire: “I’m the president’s intelligence officer.”
Did Maguire just call himself the most famous man in the United States?
Maguire said he was using “Garmin” to get to work his first week. Very retro chic with his GPS software!
Lee, I think there are some Maguire quotes will be pulled out and re-used about the whistleblower’s credibility and about the unprecedented nature of all this, but I don’t think will do much to change public opinion.
Instead, and it seems almost weird to say this, I think the facts as they come out will matter most. So far, the facts have been relatively damaging to Trump, and we’ve seen early polls show support for impeachment increasing. Certainly if evidence of an explicit quid pro quo comes out, I would expect that to continue.
There has been a lot about process today — Democrats in the House seem peeved that they didn’t get the whistleblower sooner, and see some of this as a challenge to their status as a coequal branch of government, but I agree with Chad, the fact that we have the whistleblower’s testimony will be the driving news of the day.
I know we’ve been critical of Democrats’ approach here, and the relatively unilluminating hearing. But the real fireworks happened before the hearing, when the whistleblower’s complaint and IC IG report was released by the House Intelligence committee. I think in, oh, two hours this hearing will be relatively forgotten and those two documents will be what the day is remembered for. And that’s a lot of grist for Democrats to mill. Also, if Rudy Giuliani testifies before this committee, it is going to be as much of a blockbuster as the Michael Cohen hearings from earlier this year.
Has anything come out of this hearing that has the potential to move public opinion? Or is this all just framing about 1) process; 2) credibility of the whistleblower; 3) motivation of the whistleblower; 4) potential influence of the White House; and 5) “unprecedented” nature of this complaint, which will shape further discussion of this complaint?
If Rudy Giuliani testifies before this committee, it is going to be as much of a blockbuster as the Michael Cohen hearings from earlier this year.
By my count, we have four congresspeople left to hear from: Republican Rick Crawford and Democrats Sean Patrick Maloney, Val Demings and Raja Krishnamoorthi.
Like Castro, I thought Heck did a good job of taking process concerns (when/how the complaint should have been reported) and making them seem more broadly significant. His framing seemed to be — if these allegations are true, they’re a huge deal, and Maguire didn’t take them seriously. Maguire pushed back, saying they did refer to the FBI. But overall it was a clearer and more heated back-and-forth than many of the other questions about process.
I think Heck did a good job trying to move the goalposts back from “no quid pro quo, so everything’s above board” to “it’s wrong to ask a foreign power for political help.”
Rep. Denny Heck is establishing how both the director of the FBI and the head of the FEC have said that it is unacceptable for foreign powers to interfere in U.S. elections.
I still don’t think this hearing is going to get gangbusters ratings or anything, but this is pretty impressive:
Ratcliffe is also adopting the time-honored strategy of using his time to talk endlessly instead of asking questions.
Ratcliffe says the whistleblower is “wrong in numerous respects.” Kind of head-spinning to think what this hearing would be like if Ratcliffe were in the hot seat instead of Maguire.
Democrats are doing a good job of trying to establish the “unprecedented” nature of all this. That is good pretext for impeachment.
Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe now asking questions. Again, Ratcliffe was Trump’s first choice to become director of national intelligence after Coats resigned.
Meanwhile, outside the committee room:
Castro is simultaneously emphasizing the content of the complaint and going after Maguire for saying the complaint didn’t qualify as an intelligence matter. Process AND substance!
One more interesting result from that Business Insider/SurveyMonkey poll …
They asked, “How familiar would you say you are with the situation stemming from President Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky related to Democratic candidate Joe Biden?”
Only one in three respondents said they were familiar! So public opinion on this story has a loooong way to go and a lot of room to change.
Castro now just reading the call summary out loud, which reminds me of when Democrats asked Mueller to testify so that they could put what was otherwise just a written document in a TV-ready format.
Rep. Castro is trying to establish the veracity of the whistleblower complaint by noting that the call summary released yesterday matched what the whistleblower alleged had happened. This is the kind of groundwork I expected Democrats to lay.
Maguire saying our biggest national security priority is protecting the sanctity of our election system. Makes me wonder what has him concerned that we don’t yet know about. And reminds me of Clare’s great piece about what the worst case scenario of election hacking could look like.
Rep. Hurd getting at whether the branches of government are really co-equal. Asking if the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel can override congressional rules, getting at whether the OLC would’ve had jurisdiction to tell the DNI not to share the complaint and IG report.
Should Will Hurd be hosting a show on public radio? His voice is so soothing!
Swalwell also seemed to be taking Maguire to task for not being more concerned about how the records of Trump’s interactions with foreign leaders were handled, which is interesting. Highlights that if the allegations are true, there are a lot of people who saw this conduct happening and didn’t object.