Thursday morning saw the public release of the now-declassified whistleblower complaint that began the series of events that led the House of Representatives to begin its formal impeachment inquiry targeting Donald Trump. The complaint contains a series of bombshells describing an extended effort, by Trump and Trump associates, to pressure the Ukrainian government into taking multiple actions to benefit Donald Trump's personal reelection effort—actions that include launching an investigation into 2020 presidential challenger Joe Biden and his family, as well as probing a bizarre far-right conspiracy suggesting a link between Democratic National Committee servers and Ukraine.
The whistleblower complaint alleges that the Ukrainian government was "led to believe" that Trump would not arrange the now-infamous call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unless Zelensky demonstrated a willingness to "play ball" on Trump's requests. It also describes efforts to "’lock down' all records of the call", scrubbing them from the computers usually used for the purpose, and describes "multiple officials" as having "direct knowledge" of both the call and Trump's seemingly illegal demands.
That was not the only development in the investigation into Trump's Ukrainian demands on Thursday.
A roundup of the day's other impeachment-related events:
• Acting Director of Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified before the House Intelligence Committee in the morning: Our live coverage can be found here, here, here, and here. The testimony was combative, with Maguire being repeatedly asked to justify his delay in providing the whistleblower complaint to Congress, as required by the law governing such complaints.
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• Maguire defended the move by calling the whistleblower complaint about the activities of a sitting president an "unprecedented" situation. He also confirmed that he brought the complaint to the White House, for a determination on whether the White House would claim executive privilege over the report of Trump's alleged criminal act(s).
• Maguire was generally adamant in his refusal to disclose whether he had spoken with Trump directly over the contents of the whistleblower complaint—but did break those claims of "executive privilege" to assert that Trump had never directly asked him for the identity of the whistleblower. The committee struggled to get answers from Maguire even on such straightforward questions as whether soliciting elections assistance from a foreign government is illegal under U.S. law, which it unambiguously is.
• The three key takeaways from Maguire's testimony: Maguire told the committee that the whistleblower "did the right thing" and "followed the law every step of the way.” He agreed that election security was his "most fundamental priority" as Director of National Intelligence, in direct conflict with Attorney General William Barr's Office of Legal Council determination that it was not within his intelligence purview. And, of course, Maguire’s confirmation that he shared the whistleblower report with the White House, offering them the opportunity to craft reasons why he should not share it with Congress as required by law.
• The news of the existence of a White House "secret server" onto which Trump's most damaging conversations with foreign leaders have been moved is an especially peculiar, and ironic, revelation.
• A clearly furious Trump was recorded telling supporters at a closed-door event that the whistleblower was "close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days, when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now." This was widely taken as a statement suggesting the whistleblower should be executed. Audio of Trump's remarks was also quickly leaked.
• This was followed just hours later by a report in the New York Times that gave explicit details as to the still-secret identity of the whistleblower. While the Times was widely condemned for this seeming attempt to "out" the law-abiding whistleblower, it is also possible that the Times' own sources were Trump administration officials who already know the whistleblower's identity—and are trying to leak clues to it in order to better facilitate attacks on that individual by Trump’s political and media allies.
• Republicans continued to circle the wagons around Trump, regardless of the new revelations in the whistleblower's report. Primary talking points today included an insistence that there was no explicit quid pro quo between Trump's withholding of military aid to Ukraine and his demands to the Ukrainian president, and complaints that the impeachment inquiry represented a "rush to judgment" by House Democrats. Fox News continued to defend Trump with its usual zeal … and with the White House's own talking points.
• Not all Republicans were as eager to defend Trump as their most vocal peers, however: In the Senate, the move of the day was to clam up.
• Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, continued to melt down publicly. Giuliani continues to claim his actions targeting Biden in Ukraine were undertaken on behalf of the State Department: the State Department continues to deny those claims. One side or the other is lying.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to emphasize the urgency of the whistleblower's complaint, including its description of the White House's aggressive moves to hide Trump's requests to the Ukrainian president, stating that "this is a cover-up." Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, however, had little to say.
• Whether Trump understands the jeopardy he has placed himself in is unclear, but the White House staff is contemplating how best to respond to the House's now-formal impeachment inquiry. Among the top ideas: A new "impeachment response" team to be headed up by ... Corey Lewandowski?
• The House of Representatives must cancel its upcoming recess. There is no way to square the "urgent" security matters described in the whistleblower report and the House's impeachment inquiry with a plan to break for two weeks, irretrievably delaying discovery of the full facts. The House also needs to formalize and professionalize their inquiry by better utilizing House counsel and expert prosecutors to probe for the facts, rather than relying on the back-and-forth speechmaking of lawmakers.