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House Impeachment Managers Set To Present Opening Arguments. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired January 22, 2020 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:00:00]

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: -- Office of Management and Budget revealing more about the timetable to withhold that aid from Ukraine tied -- at least it looks like, according to everything we've heard and seen, tied to Ukraine's refusal at that point to announce investigations.

[13:00:15]

Let's bring in CNN's Dana Bash. Dana, you've up on Capitol Hill. What's going on up there right now before the Senate convenes?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the senators are starting to make their way in. We're watching to see when it actually begins. I can tell you there are a lot of tired people who are wandering the halls today and will be sitting in that chamber today, because the first day went until almost 2:00 in the morning. That was a discussion and vote after vote after vote on Democrats attempts to bring in some of the witnesses and some of the facts and the evidence early on in this process before the managers and the defense make their case. They were not successful in that.

So, now, what you're seeing is the opening gambit, the opening argument, as you said earlier first by the House managers, the prosecutors in this case, to make their case as best they can to the people sitting in that chamber, the 100 senators that this president should be removed from office.

It is about as high a bar as you can imagine. They feel that they are working with at least one hand tied behind their back because they weren't successful yesterday. But it is going to be the first of three days of arguments before we hear from the Republicans from the president's defense team. Jake?

TAPPER: Thanks, Dana.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Alan Frumin, you're the former Senate parliamentarian so you have a keen understanding of what the process is going to be once the chief justice, John Roberts, comes in and reconvenes day two.

ALAN FRUMIN, SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN EMERITUS: Well, we certainly hope there will be a greater level of decorum this morning or this afternoon than we began to see last night. I found it noteworthy that the chief justice took it upon himself to reprimand both parties to basically maintain the dignity of the Senate's proceedings.

Frankly, I saw in that the handy work of my successor as Senate parliamentarian, who has a deep responsibility to inform the chief justice as to what the Senate expects in terms of decorum. The Senate is this forum for a battle among people who are not Senators, and yet the Senate's rules and its procedures and its norms need to be enforced.

And I believe the chief understood that and I'm guessing that Elizabeth listened with her spidey sense that things were getting out of hand, and she has a very good sense for that. My sense, my guess, she went to the chief and said we have a precedent here on point.

And, to me, it was fascinating, that in that precedent, the so-called pettifoggery objection, the objection was raised by senator Alabama Senator Edmund Pettus. I find that a fascinating side note to this bit of Senate decorum.

And so I think it's very important that the chief justice does preside. It is truly a remarkable situation and I'm looking for the chief to really keep a keen eye on the behavior of the parties.

TAPPER: And what exactly they had done was one of the House impeachment managers, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had essentially accused the Senate Republicans of engaging in a cover-up and then the White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, angrily demanded that Congressman Nadler apologize. It's not the kind of comment that would get you kicked off a cable news show. In fact, it might get you re-booked. But for the Senate, it was bad decorum.

FRUMIN: It's an interesting situation where the Senate has rules and rule 19 is the rule that we refer to as the shut up and sit down move that imposes disciplines on senators. But the parties here are not senators. And so the primary question is do the Senate's rules with respect to decorum and do the Senate's precedents with respect to decorum --

TAPPER: Let's go to the Senate right now where they're convening.

BARRY BLACK, SENATE CHAPLAIN: Let us pray. Sovereign God, author of liberty, we gather in this historic chamber for the solemn responsibility of these impeachment proceedings. Give wisdom to the distinguished Chief Justice John Roberts as he presides.

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Lord, you are all powerful and know our thoughts before we form them. As our lawmakers have become jurors, remind them of your admonition in first Corinthians 10:31, that whatever they do should be done for your glory. Help them remember that patriots reside on both sides of the aisle, that words have consequences and that how something is said can be as important as what is said.

Give them a civility built upon integrity that brings consistency in their beliefs and actions. We pray in your powerful name, amen.

GROUP: Amen.

ROBERTS: Please join me in reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag.

GROUP: (PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE)

ROBERTS: Would you please be seated? If there is no objection, the journal of proceedings of the trial are approved today. No objection, so ordered. The sergeant at arms will make the proclamation.

SERGEANT AT ARMS: Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, all persons are commanded to keep silent on pain of imprisonment. All Senate of the United States is sitting for the trial of the articles of impeachment, exhibited by the House of Representatives against Donald John Trump, president of the United States.

J. ROBERTS: The majority leader is recognized.

MCCONNELL: (inaudible) our colleagues, no motions -- no motions were filed this morning, so we'll proceed to the House managers' presentation. We will go for approximately two hours, then take a short recess when there is an appropriate break time between presenters.

J. ROBERTS: Pursuant to the provisions of Senate Resolution 483, the managers for the House of Representatives have 24 hours to make the presentation of their case. The Senate will now hear you.

SCHIFF: Mr. Chief Justice, Senators, counsel for the President and my fellow House managers, I want to begin by thanking you, Chief Justice, for a very long day, for the way you have presided over these proceedings.

And I want to thank the senators also. We went well into the morning, as you know, until, I believe, around 2:00 in the morning. And you paid attention to every word and argument you heard from both sides in this impeachment trial, and I know we are both deeply grateful for that.

It was an exhausting day for us, certainly. But we have adrenaline going through our veins. And for those that are required to sit and listen, it is a much more difficult task.

And of course, we know our positions. You have the added difficulty of having to weigh the facts and the law. So I want to begin by thanking you for the conduct of the proceedings yesterday, and for inviting your patience as we go forward. We have some very long days yet to come.

So let us begin. When a man, unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits, despotic in his ordinary demeanor, known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty. [13:10:00]

When such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, to join in a cry of danger to liberty, to take every opportunity of embarrassing the general government and bringing it under suspicion, to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day, it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion, that he might ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.

Those words were written by Alexander Hamilton in a letter to President George Washington, at the height of the panic of 1792, a financial credit crisis that shook our young nation.

Hamilton was responding to sentiments relayed to Washington as he traveled the country that America, in the face of that crisis, might descend from a republican form of government, plunging instead into that of monarchy.

The framers of the Constitution worried then, as we worry today, that a leader might come to power, not to carry out the will of the people that he was elected to represent, but to pursue his own interests. They feared that a president would subvert our democracy by abusing the awesome power of his office for his own personal or political gain.

SCHIFF: And so they devised a remedy as powerful as the evil it was meant to combat: impeachment. As centuries have passed our founders achieved an almost mythical character.

We are aware of their flaws, certainly some very powerful and pronounced indeed. And yet when it came to the drafting of a new system of government never seen before and with no guarantee it would succeed, we cannot help but be in awe of their genius -- their prescience even, vindicated time and time again.

Still, and maybe because of their brilliance, and the brilliance of their words we find year after year, it more difficult to imagine them as human beings -- this is no less true of Alexander Hamilton, not withstanding his recent return to celebrity.

But they were human beings, they understood human frailties even as they exhibited them. They could appreciate just as we can, how power can corrupt, and even as we struggle to understand how the framers might have responded to presidential misconduct of the kind and character that we are here to try, we should not imagine for one moment that they lacked basic commonsense, or refuse to apply it ourselves.

They knew what it was like to live under a despot and they risked their lives to be free of it, they knew they were creating enormously powerful executive, and they knew they needed to constrain it.

They did not intend for the power of impeachment to be used frequently, or over mere matters of policy -- but they put it in the Constitution for a reason, for a man who would subvert the interests of the nation to pursue his own interests. For a man who would seek to perpetuate himself in office by inviting foreign interference and cheating in election.

For a man who would be disdainful of Constitutional limit, ignoring or defeating the other branches of government and their co-equal powers. For a man who believed that the Constitution gave him the right to do anything he wanted, and practiced in the art of deception. For a man who believed that he was above the law and beholden to no one -- for a man, in short, who would be a king.

We are here today in this hallowed chamber undertaking a solemn action for only third time in history because Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, has acted precisely as Hamilton and his contemporaries feared.

President Trump solicited foreign interference in our democratic elections, abusing the power of his office to seek help from abroad to improve his reelection prospects at home. And when he was caught, he used the powers of that office to obstruct the investigation in to his own misconduct.

To implement this corrupt scheme, President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations in to two discredited allegations that would benefit President Trump's 2020 presidential campaign.

When the Ukrainian president did not immediately assent, President Trump withheld two official acts to induce the Ukrainian leader to comply -- a head of state meeting in the Oval Office, and military funding. Both were of great consequence to Ukraine, and to our national interests and security -- but one looms largest.

[13:15:00]

President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to a strategic partner at war with Russia, to secure foreign help with his reelection -- in other words, to cheat. In this way the president used official state powers available only to him, and unavailable to any political opponent to advantage himself in a democratic election.

His scheme was undertaken for simple but corrupt reason -- to help him win reelection in 2020.

But the effect of his scheme was to undermine our free and fair elections and to put our national security at risk. It was not even necessary that Ukraine undertake the political investigations the president was seeking, they merely just had to announce them. This is significant for President Trump had no interest in fighting corruption as he would claim after he was caught; rather his interest was in furthering corruption by the announcement of investigations that were completely without merit.

The first sham investigation that President Trump desired was into former Vice President Joe Biden who had sought the removal of a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor the previous -- during the previous U.S. administration. The vice president acted in accordance with U.S. official policy at the time and was supported unanimously by our European allies and key global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund that shared the concern over corruption.

Despite this fact in the course of this scheme President Trump and his agents pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into the false claim that Vice President Biden wanted the corrupt prosecutor removed from power in order to stop an investigation into Burisma holdings, a company on whose board Biden's son, Hunter, sat.

This allegation is simply untrue and it has been widely debunked by Ukrainian and American experts alike. That reality mattered not to President Trump. To him the value in promoting a negative tale about former Vice President Biden, true or false, was its usefulness to his reelection campaign. It was a smear tactic against a political opponent that President Trump apparently feared. Remarkably but predictably, Russia, too has sought this -- to support this effort to smear Mr. Biden reportedly hacking into the Ukrainian energy company at the center of the president's disinformation campaign only last week.

Russia almost certainly was looking for information related to the former vice president's son so that the Kremlin could also weaponize it against Mr. Biden just like it did against Hillary Clinton in 2016 when Russia hacked and released e-mails from her presidential campaign. And President Trump has made it abundantly clear that he would like nothing more than to make use of such dirt against Mr. Biden just as he made use of Secretary Clinton's hacked and released e-mails in his previous presidential campaign which brings us to the other sham investigation that President Trump demanded that the Ukrainian leader announce.

This investigation was related to a debunked conspiracy theory alleging that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election. This narrative propagated by the Russian Intelligence Services contends that Ukraine sought to help Hillary Clinton and harm then Candidate Trump and that a computer server providing this is fiction is hidden somewhere in Ukraine. That is the so-called crowd strike conspiracy theory. This tale is also patently false and remarkably it is precisely the inverse of what the U.S. intelligence community's unanimous assessment was that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and sweeping and systemic fashion in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

Nevertheless the president evidently believed that a public announcement lending credence to these allegations by the Ukrainian president could assist his reelection by putting to rest any doubts Americans may have had over the legitimacy of his first election, even as he invited foreign interference in the next.

To the degree that most Americans have followed the president's efforts to involve another foreign power in our election, they may be most familiar with his entreaty to the Ukrainian president on the now- infamous July 25th call to do us a favor, though, and investigate Biden in the 2016 conspiracy theory.

[13:20:00]

But that call was not the beginning of the story of the president's corrupt scheme, nor was it the end. Rather, it was merely part, although a significant part of a months-long effort by President Trump and his allies and associates who applied significance and increasing pressure on Ukraine to announce these two politically-motivated investigations.

Key figures in the Trump administration were aware or directly involved or participated in the scheme. As we saw yesterday, one witness, a million-dollar donor to the president's inaugural committee, put it this way: Everyone was in the loop.

After twice inviting Ukraine's new president to the White House without providing a specific date for the proposed visit, President Trump conditioned this coveted head-of-state meeting on the announcement of these sham investigations. For Ukraine's new and untested leader, an official meeting with the president of the United States in the Oval Office was critical. It would help bestow on him important domestic and international legitimacy as he sought to implement an ambitious anticorruption platform. Actual and apparent support from the president of the United States would also strengthen his position as he sought to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, seeking an end to Russia's illegal annexation and continued military occupation of parts of Ukraine.

But most pernicious, President Trump conditioned hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally-appropriated, taxpayer-funded military assistance for the same purpose: to apply more pressure on Ukraine's leader to announce the investigations. This military aid, which has long enjoyed bipartisan support, was designed to help Ukraine defend itself from the Kremlin's aggression. More than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies -- 15,000, and the military aid was for such essentials as sniper rifles, rocket- propelled grenade launchers, radar, night-vision goggles and other vital support for the war effort.

Most critically, the military aid that we provide Ukraine helps to protect and advance American national security interests in the region and beyond. America has an abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism and resisting any nation's efforts to remake the map of Europe by dint of military force, even as we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there.

Moreover, as one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here.

Now, when the president's scheme was exposed and the House of Representatives properly performed its constitutional responsibility to investigate the matter, President Trump used this same unrivaled authority at his disposal as commander-in-chief to cover up his wrongdoing. In unprecedented fashion, the president ordered the entire executive branch of the United States of America to categorically refuse and completely obstruct the House's impeachment investigation. Such a wholesale obstruction of a congressional impeachment has never before occurred in our democracy, and it represents one of the most blatant efforts at a cover-up in history. If not remedied by his conviction in the Senate and removal from office, President Trump's abuse of his office and obstruction of Congress will permanently alter the balance of power among the branches of government, inviting future presidents to operate as if they are also beyond the reach of accountability, congressional oversight and the law.

On the basis of this egregious misconduct, the House of Representatives returned two articles of impeachment against the president, first charging that President Trump corruptly abused the powers of the presidency to solicit foreign interference in the upcoming presidential election for his personal political benefit; and second, that President Trump obstructed an impeachment inquiry into that abuse of power in order to cover up his misconduct.

The House did not take this extraordinarily -- extraordinary step lightly. As we will discuss, impeachment exists for cases in which the conduct of the president rises beyond mere policies, disputes to be decided otherwise, and without urgency at the ballot box.

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Instead, we are here today to consider a much more grave matter, and that is an attempt to use the powers of the presidency to cheat in an election. For precisely this reason, the president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.

In corruptly using his office to gain a political advantage and abusing the powers of that office in such a way to jeopardize our national security and the integrity of our elections, in obstructing the investigation into his own wrongdoing, the president has shown that he believes that he's above the law and scornful of constraint, as we saw yesterday on the screen that under Article 2, he could do anything he wants.

Moreover, given the seriousness of the conduct at issue and its persistence, this matter cannot and must not be decided by the courts, which, apart from the presence of the chief justice here today, are given no role in impeachments in either the House or the Senate. Being drawn into litigation taking many months or years to complete would provide the president with an opportunity to continue his misconduct. He would remain secure in the knowledge that he may tie up the Congress in the courts indefinitely, as he has with Don McGann, rendering impeachment power effectively meaningless.

We also took this step with the knowledge that this was not the first time the president solicited foreign interference in our elections. In 2016, then-candidate Trump implored Russia to hack his opponent's email account, something that the Russian military agency did only hours later -- only hours later. When the president said, "Hey, Russia, if you're listening," they were listening. Only hours later, they hacked his opponent's campaign.

And the president has made it clear this was also -- not be the last time, asking China only recently to join Ukraine in investigating his political opponent. Over the coming days, we will present to you and to the American people the extensive evidence collected during the House's impeachment inquiry into the President's abuse of power, overwhelming evidence notwithstanding his unprecedented and wholesale obstruction of the investigation into that misconduct.

You will hear and read testimony from courageous public servants who upheld their oath to the Constitution and their legal obligations to comply with congressional action, despite a categorical order by President Trump not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

These are courageous Americans who were told by the President of the United States not to cooperate, not to appear, not to testify but who had the sense of duty to do so. But more than that, you will hear from witnesses who have not yet testified, like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney, Mr. Blair and Mr. Duffey, and if you can believe the President's words last month, you will also hear from Secretary Pompeo.

You will hear their testimony at the same time as the American people. That is, if you allow it, if we have a fair trial. During our presentation, you will see documentary records, those the President was unable to suppress that exposed the President's scheme in detail. You will learn of further evidence that has been revealed in the days since the House voted to impeach President Trump, even as the President and his agents have persisted in their efforts to cover up their wrongdoing from Congress and the public.

And you will see dozens of new documents providing new and critical evidence of the President's guilt that remain, at this time, in the President's hands and in the hands of the Department of Defense and the Department of State and the Office of Management and Budget, even the White House. You will see them and so will the American people, if you allow it, if, in the name of a fair trial, you will demand it.

These are politically charged times, tempers can run high, particularly where this President is concerned.

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