Spy Chief to Face Democrats on ‘Disturbing’ Whistle-Blower Claim
Spy Chief to Face Democrats on ‘Disturbing’ Whistle-Blower Claim
(Bloomberg) -- The nation’s spy chief who delayed giving Congress a whistle-blower complaint about President Donald Trump will face tough questions from House Democrats on Thursday, an early glimpse of their newly intensified impeachment focus.
Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire will testify publicly before the House Intelligence Committee about the complaint, which details Trump’s request that the president of Ukraine investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Maguire will also appear behind closed doors with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Maguire headed off a confrontation over whether Congress would see the complaint after the administration agreed to give it to the intelligence panels, but Democrats want to know -- among other things -- why he withheld it in the first place, and whether he was responding to political pressure from Trump.
The administration turned the whistle-blower complaint over to select lawmakers Wednesday, following the release of a White House memo of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. A lightly redacted report was declassified and was expected to be released to the public Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity to discuss information not yet public.
Democrats say the rough transcript of the conversation shows Trump brazenly pressuring a foreign power to undermine a political rival, while Republicans largely gave Trump a pass since there was no explicit quid pro quo.
Those early, partisan positions will dominate the questioning in Thursday’s hearing, as committee Democrats try to draw any information from Maguire that will bolster their case for Trump’s impeachment. His testimony will be pivotal for the momentum of that effort and for the political argument they present to the American people.
Maguire had agreed to testify as details of the whistle-blower’s complaint burst into public view last week. House Democrats were incensed a report that the inspector general of the intelligence community determined to be an “urgent” matter wasn’t shared with Congress within the timeline set by law.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California said it was “a travesty” that the complaint was initially withheld from Congress. After reviewing the whistle-blower report Wednesday, Schiff said it exposes ”serious wrongdoing.”
“I found the allegations deeply disturbing,” Schiff said. “We are well aware of the work we have to do.”
Demanding Answers
The inspector general, an independent government official, informed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Trump’s July 25 call could be a violation of election laws.
That complaint was referred to the Justice Department in August. The department’s criminal division concluded last week that the call didn’t warrant a criminal investigation into whether Trump broke campaign finance laws. Department officials relied solely on the memorandum of the call and didn’t interview anyone as part of its preliminary review, according to a Justice official who requested anonymity.
Schiff this week also wrote to Attorney General William Barr and others demanding answers about their involvement, including communications and legal analysis tied to the report that supported not turning it over to Congress.
Part of Thursday’s hearing will be to find out “why we weren’t given this complaint, who instructed who exactly on why this complaint was not turned over to us -- and what’s the motivation,” said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who also saw the contents of the complaint. “He’s going to have a lot of questions.”
The challenge for Maguire in the public hearing will be responding to questions about a document that has only been seen by members of the House and Senate intelligence panels.
Trump appointed Maguire to lead the intelligence community in an acting capacity less than five weeks ago, after Trump’s first choice, Texas Representative John Ratcliffe faced questions about his experience. Maguire previously led the National Counterterrorism Center, and he served as a Navy SEAL for 36 years.
“Uncharted Territory”
Much more information needs to come to light to understand what exactly transpired between Trump, his associates and Ukranian officials, said Washington attorney Robert Litt, who served as general counsel to office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration.
“The problem is we don’t know if the whistle-blower’s complaint was limited to that one conversation,” Litt said in a telephone interview. “There may have been more than one conversation. There may have been conversations that other people had on the president’s behalf. There may be documents.”
Among those unknowns is what exactly prompted the complaint and whether could it could sway independent-minded Americans -- or even congressional Republicans -- that Trump committed an impeachable offense.
Liberating that information may prove difficult because whistle-blower laws are meant to protect those who disclose wrongdoing and the president does have some prerogative to protect executive branch information.
“However you characterize it, I think there’s general agreement that the president should be able to have confidential conversations with foreign leaders and not have to disclose those because otherwise the foreign leaders aren’t going to be willing to talk to the president,” Litt added.
The question is whether that privilege extends to potentially criminal activity or whether the president has already disclosed enough of the details in his public statements.
“We are really off the edge of the map here,” said Molly Claflin, a lawyer with the watchdog group American Oversight and a former counsel to the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I don’t think that we have sense of what our laws and systems are supposed to do in this instance because we are really in uncharted territory here.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net;Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net;Andrew Harris in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton, John Harney
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