Whistle-Blower Complaint Offers Road Map for Impeachment Probe
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly raised the specter of a White House “cover-up.”
(Bloomberg) -- The newly revealed complaint by an intelligence community whistle-blower alleges that multiple government officials were surprised and alarmed about President Donald Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s leader, resulting in efforts at the White House to “lock down” records of the call.
The complaint and Thursday’s testimony by acting intelligence chief Joseph Maguire opened new avenues for an impeachment inquiry by congressional Democrats that’s likely to draw more White House and national security officials into the investigation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly raised the specter of a White House “cover-up.”
“The complaint gives us a pretty good road map of allegations we need to investigate,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said after the panel’s hearing where Maguire testified.
“There is a whole host of people, apparently, who have knowledge of these events” who the committee will want to talk to, he said, including Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.
The complaint claims that White House officials “were deeply disturbed” by a July 25 call Trump had with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and attempted to isolate a transcript by placing it in a system normally used for sensitive classified information. There were discussions within the White House about how to handle the call, in which Trump prodded Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call,” the whistle-blower, who hasn’t been publicly identified, wrote in the complaint.
Pelosi said the complaint lays out a narrative of Trump seeking to pressure the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on a potential 2020 Democratic rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, as well as White House efforts to cover the president’s tracks.
“Let’s not make any conclusions about articles of impeachment,” Pelosi said, adding that “we have to get the facts.”
The drama in Washington added to pressure on U.S. stocks already hurt by concern that global economic growth is slowing. The S&P 500 index slid for the fourth time in five days.
Democrats trained their sights on the acting U.S. intelligence chief and questions about his role in the matter during the hearing Thursday.
Maguire, who hasn’t been nominated to be director of National Intelligence and has been serving in an acting capacity since last month, repeatedly found himself on the defensive, having to explain why he withheld the whistle-blower complaint about the phone call and other actions from being sent to Congress.
Maguire described the complaint as “unprecedented” when it landed on his desk. Instead of transmitting it to Congress as Democrats say is required by law, he said he took it to White House lawyers to determine if it involved protected communications of the president that needed to be withheld.
Seeking Advice
Maguire said he also sought advice from the Justice Department about whether the complaint really did fall under a law requiring it to be transmitted to Congress, and he sent it to the department for criminal investigation.
“I didn’t receive direction from anybody,” Maguire said. “I have to comply with the way the law is, not the way some people would like the law to be.”
Some Democrats questioned why Maguire consulted with White House lawyers, given that the complaint implicated Trump and detailed suspicious actions by administration officials in handling the transcript.
House Republicans accused Pelosi and other Democrats of making a rush to judgment in opening impeachment proceedings. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the whistle-blower lacked direct knowledge of Trump’s actions and reiterated his view that the rough transcript of Trump’s call with Zelenskiy showed the president never threatened him directly with a loss of U.S. funding.
“When you read the transcript, tell me one thing in there that is impeachable,” McCarthy said at a news conference.
There were expressions of concern among some GOP lawmakers, though none have yet said the events warrant impeachment.
Republican Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, who said he read the whistle-blower complaint and the White House’s memo on Trump’s July 25 phone conversation with the Ukrainian president, said he expected that the public would find the president’s actions “disappointing.”
“I want to say to the president, ‘This is not OK, that conversation is not OK,”’ he said.
Senate Republicans
Most Republicans in the GOP-controlled Senate -- where a trial would be held if Trump were impeached in the House -- deflected questions, saying they hadn’t had a chance to review the complaint.
One Republican senator who’s close to Trump, David Perdue of Georgia, told reporters he places little credence in the allegations.
“It’s not a whistle-blower because he wasn’t in the room, he wasn’t on the phone call,” Perdue said. “This is second or third or fourth-hand information.”
A number of top Senate Democrats said the whistle-blower’s complaint was a turning point in Trump’s presidency and validation of Pelosi’s decision to open impeachment proceedings. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “nothing short of explosive.”
Some said the whistle-blower’s assertion that White House officials sought to bury records of the call was particularly damning.
“The White House tried to hide President Trump’s illegal activity by misclassifying call transcripts and moving the evidence to a separate server,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. “Put simply: Members of the Trump administration knew they were doing something deeply wrong, so they tried to conceal it. And now, they’ve been caught red-handed.”
Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said, “What matters here is not first reactions of congressional Republicans but first reactions of voters.”
--With assistance from Laura Litvan, Erik Wasson and Daniel Flatley.
To contact the reporters on this story: Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net;Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
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