October 11, 2020 • 34 mins
The Democratic effort to remove President Trump from office was a calculated hit job, which started when Bob Mueller was hired to lead the special counsel investigation to the ultimate showdown with the Senate’s Impeachment trial. This dramatic attempted coup is the subject of the new book: Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump. Newt’s guest is Byron York.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi. This is due to the virus. I'm recording from home,
so you may notice a difference in audio quality on
this episode of News World. The Democratic effort to remove
President Trump from office was a calculated hit shot which
started when Bob Muller was hired to lead the Special
Counsel investigation to the ultimate showdown with the sentence in
(00:23):
peachment Trump. This dramatic attempted coup, which every American witnessed,
is the subject of Byron York's new book, Obsession Inside
the Washington Establishments, Never Ending War on Trump. I've known
Barron for many years. He is a remarkable a reporter
and a great analyst. He's the chief political correspondent for
(00:44):
the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. Discovered the Bush,
Obama and Trump administrations, as well as Congress and every
presidential campaign since two thouves. He was previously the White
House correspondent for National Review. I'm fascinated because I do
(01:10):
have such great respect for you, to say, an analyst
and a very very thoughtful student of politics and government,
why did you decide to write Obsession Inside the Washington Establishments,
Never Ending War on Trump. Thank you very much for
having me. I appreciate those kind words. First of all,
nobody had. There had been some excellent books on the
(01:32):
Russia affair by Andy McCarthy and others, but they were
a year or two ago, and nobody caught the whole
span of time, from the beginning of the Muller investigation,
the roots of the Muller investigation, all the way through
the impeachment. And I really wanted to treat it as
one thing, and actually Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped me frame this.
(01:56):
Go back to December twenty nineteen, which is less than
a year ago. Democrats in the House were rushing to
impeach the president by Christmas, and a reporter asked Pelosi,
what's the hurry here, Why the rush, and she said,
there is no rush. This has been going on two
and a half years since Muller, and a lot of
Republicans really took note and they thought, wow, she has
(02:18):
finally spoken the truth out loud. Here this impeachment we're
talking about, it's not really about Ukraine, it's not really
about a phone call. It is a continuation of a
long effort to impeach the president and remove him from
office that started with the roots of the Mueller investigation
as early as April seventeenth, twenty sixteen, before he's even elected.
(02:45):
In fact, at that point, before he's even nominated, political
published a piece and called could Trump be impeached? Shortly
after he takes office, and November eleventh, the Nark Times
David Brooks devoted an entire column to the possibility of
moving Trump from office. Why do you think the left
went so crazy? That is a good question, I think
(03:07):
as far as the left is concerned, you have to
remember when Barack Obama is elected president in two thousand
and eight, there's a lot of celebration because they believe
Democrats have kind of cracked the code of winning the
presidency from now on. There's a new coalition of minorities,
young people, and women that elected President Obama and reelected
(03:29):
him in twenty twelve, and they believe would grow with
the steady increase of the Hispanic population in the United States,
and those two things, this new Obama coalition and demographic change,
they believed would mean that Democrats would be elected president
from now on. And as it turned out, Hillary Clinton
(03:51):
was not able to reassemble the Obama coalition in the
numbers that she needed to get elected. So this dream
kind of had a rude ending with the election of Trump,
and they were extraordinarily angry. And I tell a story
that Republicans in the House don't really understand how angry
their Democratic colleagues were. So January sixth, twenty seventeen, so
(04:15):
Trump has been elected. He has not been sworn in yet,
but the Congress meets to certify the results of the
Electoral College. Now this is a total done deal at
this point. It's a ceremonial event, and each state stands
and their electoral votes are certified, and Republicans are stunned
when a number of Democrats try to stop the proceedings.
(04:38):
They protest the certification of electoral votes from several states
on the basis that Russia got Trump elected. And it
didn't work, obviously, but Republicans were really kind of amazed.
They thought, wow, I mean, we knew you guys were
unhappy that Hillary Clinton lost, but we didn't know you
(04:58):
were this mad. And the next two years was a
continuation of revelations like this. Two Republicans as they realize
the intensity of feeling on the Democratic side, since that
was a period when there was a Republican majority in
the House. Can you imagine that same level of anger
if Trump once again wins in the electoral college and
(05:21):
now you're ever a Democratic majority that doesn't want to
seek people. I think one of the things I felt
by the time I got to the end of the book,
which ends with the president's acquittal in the impeachment trial,
I thought, if he is reelected, the intensity of the
feeling against him will only be higher. Accept Democrats will
(05:43):
have used the constitutional and legal remedies they have to
try to remove a president from office. They've already impeached him,
and I suppose they could impeach him again. We have
seen talk about Democrats trying not to recognize the if
Trump indeed does win a victory, and I think if
(06:04):
he wins a victory, it'll have to involve victory in
the electoral college, and may just involve victory in the
electro college and not in the popular vote. So I
really think we could be an uncharted territory if Trump
does win reelection. So you record in your book the
steady growing momentum. I think the early speeches for impeachment
(06:28):
were not particularly strongly supported, and the first vote an
impeachment really only got a very small minority of the
House Democrats. I think they have fifty eight votes for
impeachment in December of twenty seventeen, but the drumbeat just continues. Well,
the view was that fifty eight was actually pretty big
(06:50):
because what had happened is Representative Al Green, Democrat from Texas,
was the most persistent an energetic proponent of impeachment of
President Trump. People don't remember this, but Robert Muller was
appointed on May seventeenth, twenty seventeen. Obviously, it dominated the
news that day so much so that people don't remember.
(07:10):
On that day, May seventeenth came the first formal call
on the floor of the House of Representatives to impeach
the president, and Representative Aal Green made that call, and
basically he just bugged the Republican leadership for the next
several months, and Republicans believed that he would be able
(07:30):
to force a vote at some point on his article's impeachment,
which by the way, would have removed the president for
disrespecting Kaepernick and the NFL. So this was not a
Russia based impeachment. The leadership Speaker Paul Ryan and Steve Scalise.
The whip allowed this vote, and fifty eight Democrats voted
(07:54):
to impeach the president in December of twenty seventeen, and
the Republicans thought it would be literally a handful, and
it wasn't. And that number did grow and throughout twenty eighteen,
which was the midterm election year, the Democratic strategy was
to not talk about impeachment publicly on the campaign trail,
(08:16):
but to plan for it privately, and the support for
impeachment grew throughout twenty eighteen, even though Democrats didn't talk
a lot about it and the press didn't talk a
lot about it. Their goal was to win the majority,
but they then clearly had a sense that they were
going to try to impeach. Why did Pelosi switch was
(08:39):
she spent a long period of time trying to avoid it. Right,
Pelosi had always said that she of course was in
the House in the minority during the Clinton impeachment, and
she believed that Republicans paid a terrible price for this.
Now I know who I'm talking to. You were involved
in all this. But her argument to Democrats was, look,
(09:00):
it didn't work for Republicans in nineteen ninety eight, ninety
nine and it won't work for us, But that number
of Democrats who wanted to impeach the president kept growing.
And one of the things I discuss here is that
there's a symbiotic relationship between the Special Counsel's Office and
the House of Representatives. The Special Counsel had all the
(09:22):
powers of US law enforcement subpoena powers, evidence powers, all
sorts of powers authorities of US law enforcement, but it
could not indict the president, could not charge him with
the crime, get him convicted and removing from office. On
the other hand, the House did not have those law
(09:42):
enforcement powers, but it had the constitutional authority to impeach
the president if a majority supported that. If you listen
to Democrats throughout twenty eighteen, that was three word impeachment strategy,
which is wait for Muller, and they believe that Mueller
would deliver them because they absolutely believed in collusion. They
(10:06):
thought it was a real thing. They watched Rachel Maddow
who told him it was a real thing, and they
watched CNN told him it was a real thing, and
they believed it. So their strategy was to wait for Muller,
win the majority, and at that point Muller would give
them a roadmap and they would impeach Trump. But it
doesn't work because Mueller doesn't give them a moment. What's
(10:29):
interesting here is when Muller is first appointed on May seventeen,
twenty seventeen, he immediately begins to look for collusion, and
he looks in all the places that you knew about
if you read the newspapers at the time. He looked
into the Carter Page case because Page had taken a
trip to give a speech in Moscow in July twenty sixteen.
(10:49):
Looked into that. He looked into George Papadopoulos. He looked
into that ridiculous episode at the Republican Convention in twenty
sixteen in which Democrats claimed completely falsely that the Trump
campaign had gutted the Republican platform position on Ukraine as
a way to please Vladimir Putin. I mean, there's literally
(11:11):
nothing to that. Then he looked into the Trump Tower meetings.
He was looking for collusion in all the places that
you would expect, and he wasn't finding it. And by
December of twenty seventeen, there's a meeting on December twenty
first with the Trump defense team in Muller and the
Trump people are saying, look, you've had six months, you've
been looking for collusion. You haven't found it, And they
(11:34):
never did so for all of twenty eighteen, when we
would have these discussions on cable TV about collusion as
a real thing and Mueller is closing in and the
walls are closing in on President Trump, for all of
that time, impeachment was already kind of over inside the investigation,
and Muller had turned his attention to allegations of obstruction
(11:58):
of justice and the painful fact that Mullard could not
establish collusion or in legal terms, conspiracy or coordination. The
painful fact that he could not establish that didn't really
hit Democrats until April of twenty nineteen, when the report
is released and they can't avoid it any longer. There
(12:20):
just wasn't any collusion. Hi, this is new. I want
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(12:41):
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(13:53):
Back at the beginning of all this, Trump deciding not
to fire James Coomei during the transition really shaped his
presidency in many ways. Do you think that Trump had
fired Comy during the transition that things would have turned
out differently? I think it's entirely possible. I mean, you
could maybe argue that Trump's two biggest mistakes in his
(14:16):
first year were not firing Coomy in January of twenty
seventeen and then firing Comy in May of twenty seventeen.
During the transition, a number of people who were close
to Trump advised him to fire Comy right away. Rudy
Giuliani told me that he said to Trump, look, this
guy is going to turn on you. There's something wrong
(14:37):
with him. Chris Christie said, he is a loose cannon,
and if you keep him after you become president, he
will become your loose cannon. And a lot of their
reasoning for this was the way that Comey had handled
the Clinton email case. Now, they were in no way
sympathetic to Hillary Clinton. They were not offended on her behalf.
(14:59):
They didn't oh, you were so mean to Hillary. But
they thought it revealed Komy as being so erratic and
so headstrong and so self righteous that he would be
a problem if he stuck around. They didn't know that
the FBI was actually investigating them at the time. That
would have, I think sealed the deal for them. But
(15:20):
they knew that Komi would be a problem. So then
the question is why didn't Trump follow their advice. Obviously
he did not fire Komy when he became president, and
the reason was really pretty simple is he thought he
could bring him around. I mean, the president came to
office with the habits and approaches that he had used
(15:40):
in business for many decades, and he believed that through
the sheer force of his personality he could win people over,
he could bring them around to his point of view,
he could make call me a loyal member of the team.
So he didn't fire him, and I think we can
all agree that that really really did not work. Those
pounded then when the brand new Attorney General Sessions is
(16:04):
part of becoming attorney general, who accuses himself so that
the person who should have been defending Trump and monitoring
Comey basically can't do anything. Sessions decision to recuse himself
earned Trump's hostility until the end of time. I think
Trump will basically say, you know, the ten biggest mistakes
(16:27):
I made. Number one was hiring Jeff Sessions, and number
two through ten were hiring Jeff Sessions. I mean, he's
really really angry about that to this day. And you're right.
Sessions was in a difficult spot because he was part
of the campaign. There were a couple of completely bs
(16:48):
allegations about his own contact with Russians, and he was
interviewed by the Special Counsel's Office had no substantive role
in any of this. But he was part of the
investigation in the campaign was under investigation, and he certainly
was part of that. And he didn't hire as a
deputy someone that he had known a long time and
(17:08):
felt comfortable with and there was a kind of a
mutual loyalty. He didn't hire somebody like that. He hired
Rod Rosenstein, who had been a Justice Department official in Maryland.
And it's Rosenstein who appoints Muller the special counsel in
May of twenty seventeen. And Trump is totally stunned. He's
blindsided by what Rosenstein has done. So if Sessions had
(17:32):
stayed in the job, would that have been possible? I
don't know. Democrats on the Hill can make an awful
lot of noise, but if he had, it's possible this
could have turned out differently. When you look at all this,
you have Hillary deleting thirty one thousand emails, You have
a member of her staff taking a hammer to destroy
(17:53):
the hard drives, and somehow that's not obstruction. Meanwhile, you
have this entire effort to frame the president. And the
more we've learned about the Steel dossier, the more we
learned about the way in which they were colluding all
through the fall of sixteen in the beginning of seventeen.
(18:14):
This makes Watergate look like a minor kindergarten tour. These
guys were literally using the power of the American system
to try to destroy the president. Nited states. The thing
about the Mueller investigation is Mueller showed no real curiosity
about how the investigation began and whether it began properly
(18:39):
or not. Our revelations about the dossier came via Devinunez
in the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans had the majority.
We learned a lot later from the Justice Department Inspector
General Michael Horowitz, who told us a lot about how
the Justice Department had abused the FISA laws to get
a wire tap carter page. So you're right about the
(19:02):
obstruction stuff and Hillary Clinton and all of the destruction
of potential evidence that she did. On the other hand,
I think in a big picture, we had a situation
in twenty sixteen where both major candidates, the Republican and
the Democrat, were under FBI investigation. And you can say, well,
maybe they were both really squirrely candidates. But on the
(19:24):
other hand, maybe the FBI was out of control, investigating
priminently both major candidates was a bad situation, and we're
only now learning most of the story about what was happening.
This was a period where we really could have gone
down a very dark road that might have shattered our
(19:47):
entire process of elected self government. As you learned more
and more what she just kind of amazed. Well. I
was stunned continually by the s intensity of the drive
to remove the present from office. And there is this
(20:08):
moment in the book when Muller finishes his report in
March or twenty nineteen, and he tells the Justice Department, Okay,
I'm finished, and remember Bill Barr releases a summary of
the main conclusions, and a lot of controversy about that,
but it was entirely accurate. Then in April outcomes the
(20:29):
report and it fails to show collusion and the whole
issue of obstruction. It doesn't reach a conclusion on although
Muller is clearly accusing Trump of obstruction, but doesn't reach
a conclusion, and then a lot of error is out
of the balloon at that point. Republicans think that, but
Democrats are still holding out hope for impeaching Trump over
(20:52):
Russia and they decide that they need a Watergate moment
on national television, have a have Muller come in and
deliver a searing indictment of the president, and then everything
will be great and all Americans will support removing Trump
from office. They think that's what's going to happen. And
(21:12):
then it's a disaster and Republicans say, finally, this long
Russia ordeal is over. And they don't know it at
the time, but at that very moment, Adam Schiff and
a few others are working on a new accusation against
the president based on Ukraine. Comes out of nowhere, a
(21:34):
complete judgment call, and it ends up leading toward impeachment
within the next few months. It's almost like a horror
story where you think the threat is over and then
you relax and then boom, it comes back at you.
I was surprised by the sustained intensity of this effort.
It's sort of the zombie impeachment. You shoot it, it
(21:55):
gets back up. Having looked at all this, how do
you rate shifts will in all of this, Well, it's
usually important because, as I said earlier, the Democratic plan
in twenty eighteen was not to talk about impeachment in
public and plan for it in private. Now, obviously, in
an impeachment, an impeachment begins in the House of Representatives
(22:17):
Judiciary Committee, and the Judiciary chairman was Jerry Nadler, and
the Intelligence Committee chairman was Adam Schiff. Now, the idea
that an impeachment would originate and be handled by the
Intelligence Committee was completely new, completely precedent breaking, And the
(22:38):
whole idea that the impeachment was a matter of intelligence
was nuts. You have to remember, the concept of filing
a whistleblower complaint against the president of the United States
is crazy. There's no inspector general for the White House.
That it doesn't work that way. There's a constitutional remedy
if you want to get rid of the president, but
(22:58):
there's no inspector general for the White House, and the
Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act makes clear that whistleblower complaints
filed under that law have to deal with something under
the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. Now, the
President of the United States is not under the authority
(23:21):
of the Director of National Intelligence. It's actually the other
way around. So it made no sense legally to be
able to do this, And the Justice Department told Democrats
several times, but they did it because they could. And
the driving force in that was Adam Schiff, and he
completely got the upper hand with Jerry Nadler because House
(23:45):
Democrats had some doubts about Nadler's effectiveness to begin with.
And then a couple of things happened in the summer
of twenty nineteen after the Mueller testimony, when Republicans thought
the Russia thing was dead, Democrats did not agree. Nadler
still wanted to start an impeachment based on the Muller report.
(24:06):
He could not get witnesses to come to testify before
his committee. He was reduced to calling John Dean to
testify of Watergate fame and infamy. Who comes in and says,
you know, the last time I was in front of
this committee was in nineteen seventy four, and you know
that was a long time ago. And the hearing accomplished nothing.
(24:28):
Dean said the kind of stuff he was saying on
MSNBC at the time. And then the real nail in
the coffin for Nadler was not long after that. He
had a hearing where he had Corey Lewandowski testify and
Lewandowski just ran rings around him, He delayed, he asked
for questions to be repeated, he questioned the questionnaires. He
(24:49):
just really kind of made a fool of Nadler. And
at that point a lot of Democrats said to Speaker Pelosi, look,
Jerry Nadler cannot handled impeachment. And so that really helped
solidify the authority of Adam Schiff as the guy who
was going to run impeachment. As you well know, but
(25:24):
I participated in an impeachment before, and I was really
struck and something I had learned from O'Neill, and that
we tried to work on it. We didn't do as
good a job as we should have, because the Clinton
people were really good, and in particular James Carville and
Paul mcgillo were really good at keeping the people lined up.
But we did get thirty one Democrats to vote with
(25:46):
us to authorize the impeachment inquiry. Of course, in the
Nixon case, it was just unbelievable. I mean it was
four hundred and ten to four. But the Democrats had
to know first of all that they were never going
to get it through the Senate. We actually had a
chance to it. We thought to get it through the
Senate because the underlying evidence was so bad about Clinton's behavior,
(26:08):
But the Democrats had to know they would never get
Trump convicted of the Senate. And of course, so they're
engaged in a totally partisan effort in a way which
is I think undermines them. It was almost like they
were locked up and they couldn't get out of it.
Does that make any sense, No, it absolutely does. I
went back and looked at the impeachment authorization vote that
(26:31):
you held in nineteen ninety eight, you're corrector thirty one
Democrats who joined Republicans in this, and the New York
Times said that the House had begun an impeachment inquiry
on a partisan vote thirty one Democrats, which is not
nothing had crossed over in this case. I talked a
lot to Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the Republicans in
(26:53):
the House, who are a minority at the time, obviously
for the Trump impeachment, and they felt that when Schiff
started handling things the way that he did, for example,
when he began holding impeachment interviews depositions in secret and
Republicans were not allowed to come. You'd have this long
(27:15):
session interviewing some figure in the impeachment matter, and nobody
was allowed to come out and say what the witness
had just said. It all had to be done in secret,
and Republicans were threatened with discipline, namely Ethics Committee investigations
if they did. And this created an enormous amount of resentment.
And then we were just talking about the impeachment authorization
(27:38):
vote that you held to begin the impeachment inquiry. Pelosi
didn't hold one. All this was being done, and there
had never been a vote of the full House to
authorize an impeachment. Now, Democrats, if they stayed together, would
win that vote, but Pelosi had not held one, and
so she was just throwing out the rules and the
(28:01):
president right and left. And this created enormous resentment among Republicans,
and McCarthy and Scalise realized this. They realized that this
could create unity among Republicans, even if there were some
Republicans who were a little squishy on Trump. They all
felt that this was a fundamentally unfair process, and Scalise
(28:25):
and McCarthy realized that the strongest way to make this
point would be to have zero, that is, zero Republicans
vote when the authorization vote came finally held by Pelosi.
And then when the impeachment vote came to have zero Republicans.
Before this, you simply could not argue that it was
(28:47):
a totally partisan impeachment if Republicans stayed away. And finally,
the other thing they felt was if you had complete
one hundred percent unanimity among House Republicans, they felt that
would kind of rub off on the Senate. The Senate
would see Republicans sticking together and be inspired to do
that themselves. And that mostly worked, except for Romney, voted
(29:12):
for one article but then voted against the other. First
of all, Romney became there were two articles of impeachment,
and every other Republican voted no on both articles of impeachment,
and Romney voted no on one and yes on the other,
which meant he voted to remove the president from office,
to convict him and remove him from office. And it
(29:35):
was the first time, I believe in US history where
a Senator has voted to remove the president of his
own party from office. Well, it depends on whether he
thought of Johnson as a Republican in eighteen sixty seven,
because remember they come within one vote. I think of
(29:55):
removing him from office. That is true. It was kind
of an oddity. It's not your every day impeachment. As
we moved forward, assuming from a Trump victory, do you
think that the Democrats would have come right back as
rapidly and try to figure out how to do it again? Yes,
(30:16):
I do. I think that the idea that at some
point they would just reconcile themselves to the fact that
Trump is president. I think that those days have gone.
I think they're not going to As a matter of fact,
I know you've discussed this. This group called the Transition
Integrity Project, a group of Democrats and anti Trump Republicans
(30:38):
who had war gamed a few scenarios for a disputed election,
and one of the scenarios was that Trump wins the
electroc College clearly, no doubt about it. He wins the
electroc College, but he loses a popular vote, and which
is what happened in twenty sixteen, and this time they
don't accept it. And there's the two sides in the
(30:59):
war game that Democrats are coming up with all sources
of crazy ideas. They want to essentially charge a ransom
for approving Trump's victory. They want Trump Republicans to make
the district of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, and then
maybe create five states out of California. They just all
sorts of crazy stuff. They go to states that Trump
(31:21):
won with Democratic governors to change the electors, to get
the electors to change from Trump to Biden. So this
is a war game. This is not a real thing.
It's not the Democratic Party saying they're going to do this,
but it's an indication of the intensity on the Democratic
side right now. And if in fact Trump wins and
(31:43):
is inaugurated for a second term January twenty twenty one,
I don't know what they're going to try, but certainly
I would think they would try to impeach him again,
which makes some pretty argument from Kevin McCarthy's standpoint of
making sure there's a Republican majority in the House, just
to cut that off. But it's been wild. Listen as always,
you are a remarkable reporter. And your new book Obsession
(32:07):
Inside the Warshington Establishments, Never Ending War on Trump. We
have a little excerpt from it on our show page
at Newtsworld dot com, and we recommend very highly to
people that they can go to Amazon or Arnes and
Noble or anywhere they like to buy books and get
a copy of it. And Byron York is one of
the most thoughtful and one of the best sourced reporters
(32:31):
in Washington. So Byron, thank you very very much for
joining us and for being part of this, and thank
you it was a pleasure to be here. Great to
talk to your listener. Newts World is produced by Gingwish,
Sweet sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is DeBie Meyers
and our producer is Garnsey Slam. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
(32:54):
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Pendeley.
Special thanks to the team at Which three sixty. Please
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(33:15):
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. In the next episode of
nets World, we are one month away from the most
important election in American history, and I think it's so
important that people understand the stark contrast between President Trump
(33:36):
and Vice President Biden in the second episode. In this
election twenty twenty series, i'll discuss building the greatest economy
in Trump's America. I'm new Gingwich. This is New Tworld.
Hi. This is due to the virus. I'm recording from home,
so you may notice a difference in audio quality on
this episode of News World. The Democratic effort to remove
President Trump from office was a calculated hit shot which
started when Bob Muller was hired to lead the Special
Counsel investigation to the ultimate showdown with the sentence in
(00:23):
peachment Trump. This dramatic attempted coup, which every American witnessed,
is the subject of Byron York's new book, Obsession Inside
the Washington Establishments, Never Ending War on Trump. I've known
Barron for many years. He is a remarkable a reporter
and a great analyst. He's the chief political correspondent for
(00:44):
the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. Discovered the Bush,
Obama and Trump administrations, as well as Congress and every
presidential campaign since two thouves. He was previously the White
House correspondent for National Review. I'm fascinated because I do
(01:10):
have such great respect for you, to say, an analyst
and a very very thoughtful student of politics and government,
why did you decide to write Obsession Inside the Washington Establishments,
Never Ending War on Trump. Thank you very much for
having me. I appreciate those kind words. First of all,
nobody had. There had been some excellent books on the
(01:32):
Russia affair by Andy McCarthy and others, but they were
a year or two ago, and nobody caught the whole
span of time, from the beginning of the Muller investigation,
the roots of the Muller investigation, all the way through
the impeachment. And I really wanted to treat it as
one thing, and actually Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped me frame this.
(01:56):
Go back to December twenty nineteen, which is less than
a year ago. Democrats in the House were rushing to
impeach the president by Christmas, and a reporter asked Pelosi,
what's the hurry here, Why the rush, and she said,
there is no rush. This has been going on two
and a half years since Muller, and a lot of
Republicans really took note and they thought, wow, she has
(02:18):
finally spoken the truth out loud. Here this impeachment we're
talking about, it's not really about Ukraine, it's not really
about a phone call. It is a continuation of a
long effort to impeach the president and remove him from
office that started with the roots of the Mueller investigation
as early as April seventeenth, twenty sixteen, before he's even elected.
(02:45):
In fact, at that point, before he's even nominated, political
published a piece and called could Trump be impeached? Shortly
after he takes office, and November eleventh, the Nark Times
David Brooks devoted an entire column to the possibility of
moving Trump from office. Why do you think the left
went so crazy? That is a good question, I think
(03:07):
as far as the left is concerned, you have to
remember when Barack Obama is elected president in two thousand
and eight, there's a lot of celebration because they believe
Democrats have kind of cracked the code of winning the
presidency from now on. There's a new coalition of minorities,
young people, and women that elected President Obama and reelected
(03:29):
him in twenty twelve, and they believe would grow with
the steady increase of the Hispanic population in the United States,
and those two things, this new Obama coalition and demographic change,
they believed would mean that Democrats would be elected president
from now on. And as it turned out, Hillary Clinton
(03:51):
was not able to reassemble the Obama coalition in the
numbers that she needed to get elected. So this dream
kind of had a rude ending with the election of Trump,
and they were extraordinarily angry. And I tell a story
that Republicans in the House don't really understand how angry
their Democratic colleagues were. So January sixth, twenty seventeen, so
(04:15):
Trump has been elected. He has not been sworn in yet,
but the Congress meets to certify the results of the
Electoral College. Now this is a total done deal at
this point. It's a ceremonial event, and each state stands
and their electoral votes are certified, and Republicans are stunned
when a number of Democrats try to stop the proceedings.
(04:38):
They protest the certification of electoral votes from several states
on the basis that Russia got Trump elected. And it
didn't work, obviously, but Republicans were really kind of amazed.
They thought, wow, I mean, we knew you guys were
unhappy that Hillary Clinton lost, but we didn't know you
(04:58):
were this mad. And the next two years was a
continuation of revelations like this. Two Republicans as they realize
the intensity of feeling on the Democratic side, since that
was a period when there was a Republican majority in
the House. Can you imagine that same level of anger
if Trump once again wins in the electoral college and
(05:21):
now you're ever a Democratic majority that doesn't want to
seek people. I think one of the things I felt
by the time I got to the end of the book,
which ends with the president's acquittal in the impeachment trial,
I thought, if he is reelected, the intensity of the
feeling against him will only be higher. Accept Democrats will
(05:43):
have used the constitutional and legal remedies they have to
try to remove a president from office. They've already impeached him,
and I suppose they could impeach him again. We have
seen talk about Democrats trying not to recognize the if
Trump indeed does win a victory, and I think if
(06:04):
he wins a victory, it'll have to involve victory in
the electoral college, and may just involve victory in the
electro college and not in the popular vote. So I
really think we could be an uncharted territory if Trump
does win reelection. So you record in your book the
steady growing momentum. I think the early speeches for impeachment
(06:28):
were not particularly strongly supported, and the first vote an
impeachment really only got a very small minority of the
House Democrats. I think they have fifty eight votes for
impeachment in December of twenty seventeen, but the drumbeat just continues. Well,
the view was that fifty eight was actually pretty big
(06:50):
because what had happened is Representative Al Green, Democrat from Texas,
was the most persistent an energetic proponent of impeachment of
President Trump. People don't remember this, but Robert Muller was
appointed on May seventeenth, twenty seventeen. Obviously, it dominated the
news that day so much so that people don't remember.
(07:10):
On that day, May seventeenth came the first formal call
on the floor of the House of Representatives to impeach
the president, and Representative Aal Green made that call, and
basically he just bugged the Republican leadership for the next
several months, and Republicans believed that he would be able
(07:30):
to force a vote at some point on his article's impeachment,
which by the way, would have removed the president for
disrespecting Kaepernick and the NFL. So this was not a
Russia based impeachment. The leadership Speaker Paul Ryan and Steve Scalise.
The whip allowed this vote, and fifty eight Democrats voted
(07:54):
to impeach the president in December of twenty seventeen, and
the Republicans thought it would be literally a handful, and
it wasn't. And that number did grow and throughout twenty eighteen,
which was the midterm election year, the Democratic strategy was
to not talk about impeachment publicly on the campaign trail,
(08:16):
but to plan for it privately, and the support for
impeachment grew throughout twenty eighteen, even though Democrats didn't talk
a lot about it and the press didn't talk a
lot about it. Their goal was to win the majority,
but they then clearly had a sense that they were
going to try to impeach. Why did Pelosi switch was
(08:39):
she spent a long period of time trying to avoid it. Right,
Pelosi had always said that she of course was in
the House in the minority during the Clinton impeachment, and
she believed that Republicans paid a terrible price for this.
Now I know who I'm talking to. You were involved
in all this. But her argument to Democrats was, look,
(09:00):
it didn't work for Republicans in nineteen ninety eight, ninety
nine and it won't work for us, But that number
of Democrats who wanted to impeach the president kept growing.
And one of the things I discuss here is that
there's a symbiotic relationship between the Special Counsel's Office and
the House of Representatives. The Special Counsel had all the
(09:22):
powers of US law enforcement subpoena powers, evidence powers, all
sorts of powers authorities of US law enforcement, but it
could not indict the president, could not charge him with
the crime, get him convicted and removing from office. On
the other hand, the House did not have those law
(09:42):
enforcement powers, but it had the constitutional authority to impeach
the president if a majority supported that. If you listen
to Democrats throughout twenty eighteen, that was three word impeachment strategy,
which is wait for Muller, and they believe that Mueller
would deliver them because they absolutely believed in collusion. They
(10:06):
thought it was a real thing. They watched Rachel Maddow
who told him it was a real thing, and they
watched CNN told him it was a real thing, and
they believed it. So their strategy was to wait for Muller,
win the majority, and at that point Muller would give
them a roadmap and they would impeach Trump. But it
doesn't work because Mueller doesn't give them a moment. What's
(10:29):
interesting here is when Muller is first appointed on May seventeen,
twenty seventeen, he immediately begins to look for collusion, and
he looks in all the places that you knew about
if you read the newspapers at the time. He looked
into the Carter Page case because Page had taken a
trip to give a speech in Moscow in July twenty sixteen.
(10:49):
Looked into that. He looked into George Papadopoulos. He looked
into that ridiculous episode at the Republican Convention in twenty
sixteen in which Democrats claimed completely falsely that the Trump
campaign had gutted the Republican platform position on Ukraine as
a way to please Vladimir Putin. I mean, there's literally
(11:11):
nothing to that. Then he looked into the Trump Tower meetings.
He was looking for collusion in all the places that
you would expect, and he wasn't finding it. And by
December of twenty seventeen, there's a meeting on December twenty
first with the Trump defense team in Muller and the
Trump people are saying, look, you've had six months, you've
been looking for collusion. You haven't found it, And they
(11:34):
never did so for all of twenty eighteen, when we
would have these discussions on cable TV about collusion as
a real thing and Mueller is closing in and the
walls are closing in on President Trump, for all of
that time, impeachment was already kind of over inside the investigation,
and Muller had turned his attention to allegations of obstruction
(11:58):
of justice and the painful fact that Mullard could not
establish collusion or in legal terms, conspiracy or coordination. The
painful fact that he could not establish that didn't really
hit Democrats until April of twenty nineteen, when the report
is released and they can't avoid it any longer. There
(12:20):
just wasn't any collusion. Hi, this is new. I want
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(12:41):
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(13:05):
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(13:53):
Back at the beginning of all this, Trump deciding not
to fire James Coomei during the transition really shaped his
presidency in many ways. Do you think that Trump had
fired Comy during the transition that things would have turned
out differently? I think it's entirely possible. I mean, you
could maybe argue that Trump's two biggest mistakes in his
(14:16):
first year were not firing Coomy in January of twenty
seventeen and then firing Comy in May of twenty seventeen.
During the transition, a number of people who were close
to Trump advised him to fire Comy right away. Rudy
Giuliani told me that he said to Trump, look, this
guy is going to turn on you. There's something wrong
(14:37):
with him. Chris Christie said, he is a loose cannon,
and if you keep him after you become president, he
will become your loose cannon. And a lot of their
reasoning for this was the way that Comey had handled
the Clinton email case. Now, they were in no way
sympathetic to Hillary Clinton. They were not offended on her behalf.
(14:59):
They didn't oh, you were so mean to Hillary. But
they thought it revealed Komy as being so erratic and
so headstrong and so self righteous that he would be
a problem if he stuck around. They didn't know that
the FBI was actually investigating them at the time. That
would have, I think sealed the deal for them. But
(15:20):
they knew that Komi would be a problem. So then
the question is why didn't Trump follow their advice. Obviously
he did not fire Komy when he became president, and
the reason was really pretty simple is he thought he
could bring him around. I mean, the president came to
office with the habits and approaches that he had used
(15:40):
in business for many decades, and he believed that through
the sheer force of his personality he could win people over,
he could bring them around to his point of view,
he could make call me a loyal member of the team.
So he didn't fire him, and I think we can
all agree that that really really did not work. Those
pounded then when the brand new Attorney General Sessions is
(16:04):
part of becoming attorney general, who accuses himself so that
the person who should have been defending Trump and monitoring
Comey basically can't do anything. Sessions decision to recuse himself
earned Trump's hostility until the end of time. I think
Trump will basically say, you know, the ten biggest mistakes
(16:27):
I made. Number one was hiring Jeff Sessions, and number
two through ten were hiring Jeff Sessions. I mean, he's
really really angry about that to this day. And you're right.
Sessions was in a difficult spot because he was part
of the campaign. There were a couple of completely bs
(16:48):
allegations about his own contact with Russians, and he was
interviewed by the Special Counsel's Office had no substantive role
in any of this. But he was part of the
investigation in the campaign was under investigation, and he certainly
was part of that. And he didn't hire as a
deputy someone that he had known a long time and
(17:08):
felt comfortable with and there was a kind of a
mutual loyalty. He didn't hire somebody like that. He hired
Rod Rosenstein, who had been a Justice Department official in Maryland.
And it's Rosenstein who appoints Muller the special counsel in
May of twenty seventeen. And Trump is totally stunned. He's
blindsided by what Rosenstein has done. So if Sessions had
(17:32):
stayed in the job, would that have been possible? I
don't know. Democrats on the Hill can make an awful
lot of noise, but if he had, it's possible this
could have turned out differently. When you look at all this,
you have Hillary deleting thirty one thousand emails, You have
a member of her staff taking a hammer to destroy
(17:53):
the hard drives, and somehow that's not obstruction. Meanwhile, you
have this entire effort to frame the president. And the
more we've learned about the Steel dossier, the more we
learned about the way in which they were colluding all
through the fall of sixteen in the beginning of seventeen.
(18:14):
This makes Watergate look like a minor kindergarten tour. These
guys were literally using the power of the American system
to try to destroy the president. Nited states. The thing
about the Mueller investigation is Mueller showed no real curiosity
about how the investigation began and whether it began properly
(18:39):
or not. Our revelations about the dossier came via Devinunez
in the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans had the majority.
We learned a lot later from the Justice Department Inspector
General Michael Horowitz, who told us a lot about how
the Justice Department had abused the FISA laws to get
a wire tap carter page. So you're right about the
(19:02):
obstruction stuff and Hillary Clinton and all of the destruction
of potential evidence that she did. On the other hand,
I think in a big picture, we had a situation
in twenty sixteen where both major candidates, the Republican and
the Democrat, were under FBI investigation. And you can say, well,
maybe they were both really squirrely candidates. But on the
(19:24):
other hand, maybe the FBI was out of control, investigating
priminently both major candidates was a bad situation, and we're
only now learning most of the story about what was happening.
This was a period where we really could have gone
down a very dark road that might have shattered our
(19:47):
entire process of elected self government. As you learned more
and more what she just kind of amazed. Well. I
was stunned continually by the s intensity of the drive
to remove the present from office. And there is this
(20:08):
moment in the book when Muller finishes his report in
March or twenty nineteen, and he tells the Justice Department, Okay,
I'm finished, and remember Bill Barr releases a summary of
the main conclusions, and a lot of controversy about that,
but it was entirely accurate. Then in April outcomes the
(20:29):
report and it fails to show collusion and the whole
issue of obstruction. It doesn't reach a conclusion on although
Muller is clearly accusing Trump of obstruction, but doesn't reach
a conclusion, and then a lot of error is out
of the balloon at that point. Republicans think that, but
Democrats are still holding out hope for impeaching Trump over
(20:52):
Russia and they decide that they need a Watergate moment
on national television, have a have Muller come in and
deliver a searing indictment of the president, and then everything
will be great and all Americans will support removing Trump
from office. They think that's what's going to happen. And
(21:12):
then it's a disaster and Republicans say, finally, this long
Russia ordeal is over. And they don't know it at
the time, but at that very moment, Adam Schiff and
a few others are working on a new accusation against
the president based on Ukraine. Comes out of nowhere, a
(21:34):
complete judgment call, and it ends up leading toward impeachment
within the next few months. It's almost like a horror
story where you think the threat is over and then
you relax and then boom, it comes back at you.
I was surprised by the sustained intensity of this effort.
It's sort of the zombie impeachment. You shoot it, it
(21:55):
gets back up. Having looked at all this, how do
you rate shifts will in all of this, Well, it's
usually important because, as I said earlier, the Democratic plan
in twenty eighteen was not to talk about impeachment in
public and plan for it in private. Now, obviously, in
an impeachment, an impeachment begins in the House of Representatives
(22:17):
Judiciary Committee, and the Judiciary chairman was Jerry Nadler, and
the Intelligence Committee chairman was Adam Schiff. Now, the idea
that an impeachment would originate and be handled by the
Intelligence Committee was completely new, completely precedent breaking, And the
(22:38):
whole idea that the impeachment was a matter of intelligence
was nuts. You have to remember, the concept of filing
a whistleblower complaint against the president of the United States
is crazy. There's no inspector general for the White House.
That it doesn't work that way. There's a constitutional remedy
if you want to get rid of the president, but
(22:58):
there's no inspector general for the White House, and the
Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act makes clear that whistleblower complaints
filed under that law have to deal with something under
the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. Now, the
President of the United States is not under the authority
(23:21):
of the Director of National Intelligence. It's actually the other
way around. So it made no sense legally to be
able to do this, And the Justice Department told Democrats
several times, but they did it because they could. And
the driving force in that was Adam Schiff, and he
completely got the upper hand with Jerry Nadler because House
(23:45):
Democrats had some doubts about Nadler's effectiveness to begin with.
And then a couple of things happened in the summer
of twenty nineteen after the Mueller testimony, when Republicans thought
the Russia thing was dead, Democrats did not agree. Nadler
still wanted to start an impeachment based on the Muller report.
(24:06):
He could not get witnesses to come to testify before
his committee. He was reduced to calling John Dean to
testify of Watergate fame and infamy. Who comes in and says,
you know, the last time I was in front of
this committee was in nineteen seventy four, and you know
that was a long time ago. And the hearing accomplished nothing.
(24:28):
Dean said the kind of stuff he was saying on
MSNBC at the time. And then the real nail in
the coffin for Nadler was not long after that. He
had a hearing where he had Corey Lewandowski testify and
Lewandowski just ran rings around him, He delayed, he asked
for questions to be repeated, he questioned the questionnaires. He
(24:49):
just really kind of made a fool of Nadler. And
at that point a lot of Democrats said to Speaker Pelosi, look,
Jerry Nadler cannot handled impeachment. And so that really helped
solidify the authority of Adam Schiff as the guy who
was going to run impeachment. As you well know, but
(25:24):
I participated in an impeachment before, and I was really
struck and something I had learned from O'Neill, and that
we tried to work on it. We didn't do as
good a job as we should have, because the Clinton
people were really good, and in particular James Carville and
Paul mcgillo were really good at keeping the people lined up.
But we did get thirty one Democrats to vote with
(25:46):
us to authorize the impeachment inquiry. Of course, in the
Nixon case, it was just unbelievable. I mean it was
four hundred and ten to four. But the Democrats had
to know first of all that they were never going
to get it through the Senate. We actually had a
chance to it. We thought to get it through the
Senate because the underlying evidence was so bad about Clinton's behavior,
(26:08):
But the Democrats had to know they would never get
Trump convicted of the Senate. And of course, so they're
engaged in a totally partisan effort in a way which
is I think undermines them. It was almost like they
were locked up and they couldn't get out of it.
Does that make any sense, No, it absolutely does. I
went back and looked at the impeachment authorization vote that
(26:31):
you held in nineteen ninety eight, you're corrector thirty one
Democrats who joined Republicans in this, and the New York
Times said that the House had begun an impeachment inquiry
on a partisan vote thirty one Democrats, which is not
nothing had crossed over in this case. I talked a
lot to Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the Republicans in
(26:53):
the House, who are a minority at the time, obviously
for the Trump impeachment, and they felt that when Schiff
started handling things the way that he did, for example,
when he began holding impeachment interviews depositions in secret and
Republicans were not allowed to come. You'd have this long
(27:15):
session interviewing some figure in the impeachment matter, and nobody
was allowed to come out and say what the witness
had just said. It all had to be done in secret,
and Republicans were threatened with discipline, namely Ethics Committee investigations
if they did. And this created an enormous amount of resentment.
And then we were just talking about the impeachment authorization
(27:38):
vote that you held to begin the impeachment inquiry. Pelosi
didn't hold one. All this was being done, and there
had never been a vote of the full House to
authorize an impeachment. Now, Democrats, if they stayed together, would
win that vote, but Pelosi had not held one, and
so she was just throwing out the rules and the
(28:01):
president right and left. And this created enormous resentment among Republicans,
and McCarthy and Scalise realized this. They realized that this
could create unity among Republicans, even if there were some
Republicans who were a little squishy on Trump. They all
felt that this was a fundamentally unfair process, and Scalise
(28:25):
and McCarthy realized that the strongest way to make this
point would be to have zero, that is, zero Republicans
vote when the authorization vote came finally held by Pelosi.
And then when the impeachment vote came to have zero Republicans.
Before this, you simply could not argue that it was
(28:47):
a totally partisan impeachment if Republicans stayed away. And finally,
the other thing they felt was if you had complete
one hundred percent unanimity among House Republicans, they felt that
would kind of rub off on the Senate. The Senate
would see Republicans sticking together and be inspired to do
that themselves. And that mostly worked, except for Romney, voted
(29:12):
for one article but then voted against the other. First
of all, Romney became there were two articles of impeachment,
and every other Republican voted no on both articles of impeachment,
and Romney voted no on one and yes on the other,
which meant he voted to remove the president from office,
to convict him and remove him from office. And it
(29:35):
was the first time, I believe in US history where
a Senator has voted to remove the president of his
own party from office. Well, it depends on whether he
thought of Johnson as a Republican in eighteen sixty seven,
because remember they come within one vote. I think of
(29:55):
removing him from office. That is true. It was kind
of an oddity. It's not your every day impeachment. As
we moved forward, assuming from a Trump victory, do you
think that the Democrats would have come right back as
rapidly and try to figure out how to do it again? Yes,
(30:16):
I do. I think that the idea that at some
point they would just reconcile themselves to the fact that
Trump is president. I think that those days have gone.
I think they're not going to As a matter of fact,
I know you've discussed this. This group called the Transition
Integrity Project, a group of Democrats and anti Trump Republicans
(30:38):
who had war gamed a few scenarios for a disputed election,
and one of the scenarios was that Trump wins the
electroc College clearly, no doubt about it. He wins the
electroc College, but he loses a popular vote, and which
is what happened in twenty sixteen, and this time they
don't accept it. And there's the two sides in the
(30:59):
war game that Democrats are coming up with all sources
of crazy ideas. They want to essentially charge a ransom
for approving Trump's victory. They want Trump Republicans to make
the district of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, and then
maybe create five states out of California. They just all
sorts of crazy stuff. They go to states that Trump
(31:21):
won with Democratic governors to change the electors, to get
the electors to change from Trump to Biden. So this
is a war game. This is not a real thing.
It's not the Democratic Party saying they're going to do this,
but it's an indication of the intensity on the Democratic
side right now. And if in fact Trump wins and
(31:43):
is inaugurated for a second term January twenty twenty one,
I don't know what they're going to try, but certainly
I would think they would try to impeach him again,
which makes some pretty argument from Kevin McCarthy's standpoint of
making sure there's a Republican majority in the House, just
to cut that off. But it's been wild. Listen as always,
you are a remarkable reporter. And your new book Obsession
(32:07):
Inside the Warshington Establishments, Never Ending War on Trump. We
have a little excerpt from it on our show page
at Newtsworld dot com, and we recommend very highly to
people that they can go to Amazon or Arnes and
Noble or anywhere they like to buy books and get
a copy of it. And Byron York is one of
the most thoughtful and one of the best sourced reporters
(32:31):
in Washington. So Byron, thank you very very much for
joining us and for being part of this, and thank
you it was a pleasure to be here. Great to
talk to your listener. Newts World is produced by Gingwish,
Sweet sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is DeBie Meyers
and our producer is Garnsey Slam. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
(32:54):
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Pendeley.
Special thanks to the team at Which three sixty. Please
email me with your questions at Gingwish three sixty dot
com slash questions. I'll answer a selection of questions in
future episodes. If you've been enjoying new Tworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with
(33:15):
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. In the next episode of
nets World, we are one month away from the most
important election in American history, and I think it's so
important that people understand the stark contrast between President Trump
(33:36):
and Vice President Biden in the second episode. In this
election twenty twenty series, i'll discuss building the greatest economy
in Trump's America. I'm new Gingwich. This is New Tworld.
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