♪usic] asbattle lines are drawn president trump faces impeachment. i'm robert costa. welcome to "washington week." >> the actions of the trump presidency rev rledishonorable fact of the president's betrayal, of his oath of office, betrayalf o national security, and betrayal of the integrity o our eleleions. therefore, today, i'm announcin the house of representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. >> a whistle-blower c aplaint sparksction in the house. under scrutiny,xchanges enbeeen president trump and the president of ukraine. did president trump abuse his power? republicans fight back. >> this phone calls a nothing in terms of a quid pro quo. the president of the united states remotely sugge

to the ukraine, if you don't d my political bidding, i'm gonna cut your money off. it' a joke. impeachment for that? >> but the acting director of national ielligence did dismiss the complaint. >> i believe that the whistlblower and the inspector general have acted in good faith throughout. week, next.side a momentous ♪[music] >> this is "washington week." funding is provided by... ♪[music] >> kevin. >> kevinla [appuse] >> kevin! p advice for life. life wellnned. learn more at raymondjames.com.a itional funding is i provided by the yuen committed to bridging cultural dierences in our communities.

the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contrutions totrour pbsbs station from viewers like you. thank you!kou >> once again, ftom washi moderator robert costa. >> it was a cotic scene at the capital this week following speaker pelosi's announcement of an internet impeachment iuiry. imeyou could sense them austing, at uneasily, to the new political dynamics and to the serious questions now facing congress and the trump administration. at the heart of the debate, a seven-page while-blower complaint tt claims president personal gain and endangered national security. officialshite housewh trd to keep his conversations with the ukrainianresident, volodymyr zelensky, a secret. e complaint alleges that mr. trump pushed the ukrainian president in a july 25 phone

ll to investigate democratic presidential candidate joe biden and his son, c hunter, all as hundreds of millions in u.s. military aidid for ukraine had t to be released. the president, the whistle-blower wrote, was, quote, using the powerf his offi to solic interference from a forgn country in the 2020 election. the whisower goe on to say, the record of the call was put on a separate computer system as a way of shielding it from wid view. joining me tonight, yamiche alcindor, white house correspondent for the pbs nehour. philil rucker, white house bureau chief for the washiton post. nancy cordes, chief congressional correspondent for orcbs news. and kaitlan collins, white house correspoent for cnn. let's begin with speaker pelosi decision. here is what t she saidrsday. >> it's a sad week for our country. very prayerfully andate oticly, we had to -- pat

patrioticaey, we had to c to a decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry of the president of tf united states. this is nothing that we take lightly. we wanted to have a fuller understanding of the facts. >> why was this complaint the breaking point for house democrats? nancy, you've been ohipitolpi all week. i've seen you in the hallways. why now? for speake pelosi? >> a couple of reasons. number one, this complaint, this ise, democrats feel, is easier for the america public to unrstandhan the russia issue. it goes to the hrt of t president's actions, wreas the mueller investigigion that we all lived through for two years had to do with a lot of people around t president, layers removed from the president. this was theredent himself in a phone call wit the t.rainian presiden also, with holding military aid and that gets to the heartf national securityoreignng

affairs, somet else that's deeply troubling to democrats and privately to some publicans as well. inside the white house, do they feel the se way, that this moment is different? >> yes. they didn't at the beginning of the week.ey were dismissing it as this was starting to develop, starting to te shape. was just, you guys are of playing it in the media. mocrs are takindvantage of it. a lot of that changed after formal impeachment and then the next day -- or thatay, t president made the decision tot release transcript a it came out the next day thought it was goingngo be.heyor so people who typically in the past have dismissed everything, they weathered the developmentse in russian investigation, they realize this is different. and it's making them nervous. >> i wonder what was part of that tipping point for the democrats. ook at the o ed. some of the moderates. was tt on speaker pelosi's mind as she moved forward? >> the soues t talkedo told me very much what nancy just articuted, which is that for a long time, democrats were

articulating this ide that they felt that the presidet was using the office wrongly, that was doing things completely out of the norm, that he w profitingrom theresident, that he was essentially just a bad actor in the white house. but this week they got something that they could explain to theeo americane. it was ts really, really short thing to s. the president was o with a foreign leader, trying to get them to meddl in the 2020 election. that's it. that's the argument that democrats are making.'s th lot different than the mueller report and all the things going on there. so i think nancy peli also felt, i think, a little pressur from her caucus, because we saw john lewis, theonscience o to the house floor and say i a now in favor of an impeairment in what we saw wasohn lewis going out before nancy pelosi.ncyso he was following her caucus. a lot of people were ready for this. >> phil, you cover president trump, day in, day out. when you read the whistle-blocor interaction with the ukrainianen

prest,hat did it reveal tol you about how he uses his power? >> it revealed a patrn of behavior in such granular detail in that whistle-blower complacot. it wasn't just the whistle-blower. it wastle-orroborate based on te whistle-blower's ctacts within the government,t, other white house aides,ther officials who werere alarmed by the presidents behavior, and it documented a president who really sees himself as lbove the. we havwe just had a two-year tional conversation about how it is illegalr and impro for a present or government official to seek help in a camroign a foreign government or a foreign leader. and yet that's what the document shows president trump tried to do with his ukrainian counterpart. >> if that's what it shows, why did oseo white house c relee a memo about the call? >> it's interesting to see of who wanted it out there. secretarof state me pompeo saying don't do this, advising the president that it was going to set a bad precedent. but the attorney general, bill

barr, was pushing for it, saying, yes, we should just release it. it's going to dispel some of this drama. then, of course, it comes out and you see how many tim the president was telling the ukrainian president to get with the attorney general and it left a lot of people in trump world wondering why they pushed for it. some say they think barrr realizedet was going to ugly no matter what and he wanted to just get it out there andve not he d drip, drip of information. but it's still confounding to people. >> congressional rreublins ouseuring the white as well, because they were wondering, why the president delayed the aid. $250 million, set aside by the pentagon, by congress, for president.eld up by u the even if it wasn't a quid pro quo, do republicans worry about thespect of foreign interference raised by this memorandum? >> absutely. d the fac that we learned this week that even the leader of the senate, republican mitch mcconnell, who should ordinarily

be a top ally of this administration, even he says that he was left in the dark about why that aid was withheld. for months. he says he spoke to the secretary of state. he spoke to the secretary of defense and was given no explanation. so you really saw the leader of the senate puttiti some distance between himself and thems president on ts issue. not throwing him a lifeline at all, saying even i didn't know what wasoing on. and yes, that is troubling to republicans, because they see a huge strategic advantage an alalance with ane ukraine. they believe that the u.s. needs to protect ukraine against russia and that made this whole situation more troubling. >> this was nor than -- more than a phone call. p you talk to rudy giuliani all the time as ate rep >> ha ha! [laughter] >> but he was mounting a pressure camign. what ala did tha t raise among

democrats when they read ts neport and maybe even sombl s? >> rudy giuliani is claiming that the state department called him up and said, we need your help with ukraine. so that in and of itself is rudy giuliani essentially sayingas tt he being c ct by c c united states to be a diplomat to ukraine. that pro pematic to democrats. they say, how is the president's personal lawyer now acting as a sort of ambassador the it's alsoecause, of course, he's theresident's personal lawyer. so wha you see is the president releasing the democrats -- putting his own political interests in front of the national interests of this country. you also have in rudy giuliani someone who is saying now tt testify before congress. isd i think that's going to be an interesting dn on his part, because democrats are very, very eager toalk to rudy giuliani. they'ralso eager to talk to, i think, a number of othereople complaint.nhis i think, like the mueller report, what we see in this complaint is a wholeho number of people around the president doing two things.

either, one, helping h actions along, if you're rudy giulianwo or trying to mitigate what he's doing by giving ukraine vice by saying, look, thi is how you can navigate the president, telling you to do >> it's interesting to see thes. debate play out about whether th should have giuliani testify. on oneify. hand, obviously he'st the heart of this controversy. there is no one whono more about how all this went down. on the other hand, if his apancesefore congress i anything like his cle news appearances, it's b gonna you e,ow, ankly a little over the top. and democrats do worry that it has the potential to sortf turn the entire impeachment process, which they'd like to be very serio ,ernto something of a circus. so that's the tra-off. >> and at a certain point, there y start be questions within the trump orbit about whether rudy giuliani is eectively serving as the president's lawyer in this case. hens now actor and a

principal, a subject of this investigation, and at what point does tha t become a distracti d for the president? at what point is he too focused on explaining his own actions with ukraine that he's not focused entirelyef onding the president? >> what about this issue of a separate compur server? who do we know about that, mbe shielding information from shieothers in the administratio? >> that's what's so ieresting about what happened today. u saw the preside p questioning this wstle-blower. a lot of what was in this compintasctually come to match what the white house confirmed. onof the bhegest parts w learned in the complaintas that the transcrip of this conversation with thekrainian president was moved from where are typicallyith heads of states stored. it was put on a server where you have to essentially enter code word to be able to access thi formation. it's typically for n nional security information,iv really

sens stuff, not just readoutsf calls with forei leaders. that was really interesting to people. and tt -- the white house hadn't commentedn it. but today the whistle-blower's complaint said white lawyers directed sff to move it there. today we got a statement from the white house sayg it was a national security council lawyer who told officials to move ite. th what that tells you is the white house council's office wants to say didn't have anything to do with this. it was a national security council lawyer w it. that's something people are going to be payayg attention to. >> we learned thatou the foreign affairs committee has subpoenaed the secretary of state, mikeul pompeo. we learn more about this whole operation if he's called to capitol hill?el >> absol what they reallyutant from pompeo is documen. they want to know more about foreign affairs officers a the embassy, in ukraine, who apparently expressed concern freelancing in that country as a sort of quasi diplomat.

d, you know, what exactly the concerns were that they were they want to know more about, you know, giuliani is arguing that hell did this at the behest of the state department. and so dememrats have been asking for an enormous cache of document from the state department. they haven't gotten athing so far. so they took the next step thiss week. they now say that the secretary state has a week to turn the documents over. let's see if the administration is more receptive to this tacti now thans been in the past. >> and s we're grappling with theubstance of the complaint. there' also the politics. acting dni joseph maguire testified before congress thursday to address questions about t t whistle-blower complaint and why he and theel white hseed handing it over. political battle lines were quickly drawn the chairman of the house intelligence committee, adam schiff, laid outti the democ argument. >> the president of the united states has betra bd his oath of office, betrayed his oath to

defend our national security and betrayed his oath to defd our nstitution for his personal political benefit. >> ranking repnglican devin nuñez laid out the.p. case. >> the democrats' mania toov turn the 2016 elections, everythinghey touch gets hopelessly politicized. with the russian hoax, office our intellince agencies. now today, the whistle-blower process is the casualty. >> what a pivot point foi president t his entire presidencyn the line. impeachment now on capitol hill. does -- has he changed own view of how he's going to move >> he doesn't seem to have changed his way. he's followiwi a traditional playbook that we've seen from him, which is i try to discredithe accusers and then to counterattack and kick up a lot oft dust, to create distractions, in this case around biden, to divert attention from the facts about his own conduct.

thiss probably gonna continue. the problem that he faces i is that the white house is understaffed right now. in se ry'pects, the demorarazed over all of the heat that they've been facing. operation. have a they don't have a war rm in place. to move forward strategically >> there's aually talk about bringing in an outde team that can handle this p.r. battle and people in the white house cane focus on governing. but remember, there's an actingr chief of staht now. the press secretary is holding three jobs at once. its not a fully running machine at the moment. >> w>>l there be a war room? >> less talk of a war rm, more of a team that could potentially be onheotennse or outside that uld he strategize communications. essentiallyinight back a the democrats and provide them with someone who could spearhead strategy. what's been interesting is there are people who areer outside the white house now, from trump's campaign world, that are trying to get into t this,ing to --

>> like who? >> trying to step in. corey lewandows present's former campan manager, a few other officials. they've t a list. there have been conversations about starting tn the white house. president yet.ade it up to the ltiple people s s the president is kind of in denial eaout the situation he's in. he doesn'tze the gravity of it. ally doesn't thinke needs a team like this to help. there are main staysnse the white house also pushing back be use it's a very territorial west wing. of course, he's goi t need back.e to help him pus p >> he'll try it all himself, as he always does. we saw on twitter this morning him launching a series of attacks that he presumably thouimt oflf. >> this political war of the white house, what abo demonats? hey keep this impeachment narrowly focused on ukraine?cy >> nelosi says she wants to kee this narrowly focused. and it's smart on the democrats' part to just talk about this call instead of saying, well,

let'ell,ally try toack up hunter bryen. let'so make the case that joe biden wasn't corrupt. let's try to see if d jr. and all the issues with the president's own corldre whetheot they're profiting 's tenureeside here w they don'tt to have all those conversations. i think they learned in the mueller report that there were so many ifferefe avenues to go down that the president kind of threw things on the wall and the american people frank coused. if you just keep saying, look, he was onhe call with the president of the ukraine, he's pressuring him, pressurg him,t democrats w that message. but on the war room aspect, i've been talki to people inside the white house, as we allou ha, and they sound like they just are still try to formulate what to do. but thenn when you talk to the trump administration, they're sayi, well, we're going to be putting out millions of ads to yo fight thi in tv ads. ngat they have is essentially a war room opera in the trump campgn but that is set up to

re-elect the president, not to fight impeachment. >> and corey lewandowski may be but wha about senate republicans? are they going to do the same? >> well, there are two camps. there are republicans who are still stilding by the president, anytime you t ask themy say this whistle-blower just has secondhand infortion. >>hat's what the say publicly, nancy. what do they say to you privately? >> well, there is a gup that is standing by him. they say it's unfairnd all democrats care about is impeachmt. there is another group of senate republicans who feel deeply uneasy about the president's strategy, who frankly are worn out after defending him for several yea, butho can see where this is all headed. that's the reality. they can i see now thi going to land in the lap of the w senate,hether they like it or not. and in fact, mcconnell himself has said we go immediately into an impeachnt file. >> what's your read on mcconnell? >> i think that mcconnell is --

he's walking a fine li here. he is someone who, in the past, has always stood by the esidt if he can find any rationale whatsoever. he really tries to, you know, parsrs out the times when he looks for distance with this prident, because that's not a very comfortable place to be, particularly in this party. but i do think for the first time, republicans appear to be thinking about what could ly come next. i mean,hat's several steps down the road. they don't want to go t tre y. but th reality is this is no longer just a p.r. war. we're now looking real lifee developments. the ambassador essentially to ukraine has just stepped down. democrats in the house are planning to conduct depositions with fivee state department officials jt in t next two weeks. so we're going to s a snowballing effect here. >> how significant a a the statemts by senator sass of

nebraska, the senator of utah, raising ccerns a republicans >> they're president significant because i think it's clear that irey speak for a number of their colleagueses who are just afraid to say so. the dynamic can change quickly. if you have more evidence coming forward i this impeachment on the house, if you have a vote on the houseoloor t actually im aach the president and it kicks over to the senate, it could be a very different calculus. the senators to vote to convict the president. they only need -- it's a two-thirds majority of the chamber. and there's a world in which could actuay happen. >> and trump has always been of theserustf people. a lot of people privately don't like the president. there are these main stayn establishment republicans who the president has made their life ver difficult. so i agree i don't think it's likely but i

just don't think it's guaranteed that he'll be fine.ar >> and of the thing that may open these cracks widra, public onion. for now, a new pbs newshour poll shs americans are still divided on this start of an impeachment inquiry. 49% of adults surveye nationally approve. 46 disapprove. the divide is more srk when broken down along party lines. 88% of democrats approve. 93% of republicans disapprove. senator ernst of iowa, corey gardner of colorado, all up for re-election in when you're talking to your white house sources, are those the people they'reaying attentio r to on theublican side? is it the senators who are retiring, like alexander ofte essee? maybe all of them? >> i can imagine that the white house is loong at all of these people. i think of repsentative turner from ohio in the meeting with joseph maguire. he says, look, i save a message for the president, this isn't ok. i think the white house iso in

ways keeping their ears open for all republicans thinking about this. i also think it's i important, we've asked people in that poll how much ofhis is going to e in 2020. you v the majority of people said it was not going to have any factor. like 58%f them. so it's important to also note that as republicans think about how this mig impact the election, we're already getting a sense from people that this isn'thi going to impact the vote. washington.historic week in >> how is this different than we've seen imp ichment beforen erican history? you now have twitter, cable news. you ave conservative infrastructure out there that's echoing the president at every turn. does that buoy the white house that they feel like even if republicans are cracking atme they have a wider universe of support? >> well, with trump in sparticular, he's gotething about him that has helped him evade things that would have brought any other politician down. of course, there are s many stories over the last few years since he's been in office, since he's been on the campaign trail.

withheresident, we're talking about having a tea t to help him strategize, publicly defend him. he may not needt, because of course he's the president. he's got his twitter. 's sometimes his own best spokesman but he also has entire news channel that typically are in his favor. he's got radiohows, a huge twitter following of people ready to defend him. thatould help potentially. that's still something that's an open question.an >>, when you're on the, hill talking to democrats, republicans, what's the time line? >> the time le really depends on whion democrat you yalk to, because there are some, particularly from swing districts, who don't want to ove ohadow the agenda for the next six months. they believe that that would b very difficult politically for them. so i was talking tone swing district democrat this week, who had just kind of come over fmth the side, and was nowas supporting an impeachment inquiry, who said that he vote by the endf this week.ould

ha ha! [lauauter] >> so want to get this ove t and done with. are others who say look at this whistle-blower report. new names to track down.llow. so much more investigating to do. and they want t follow everyry thread to the end. and be able to put together the st air-tight case possible. so the reality is, i think speaker pelosios herself has sad multiple times tt shehe wantso be expeditious. that was her word this week, peditis. >> expeditious? >> ha ha! >> expedious is what this show has been. this has been quick. it is already the end. >> what? i know. thank youngor sha our ening with us. we will continue the conversation on the "washington week extra." we will look at how the ffpeachment debatets the 2020 presidential race. catch ih on our website, facebook orbe. i'm robert costa. have a great weekend! ♪[music][mus

>> corpote funding for "wngton week" is i provided by financiaia services firm raymond james. additional fundi is provided by the yueue foundation.te comm to bridging cultural differences in our communities.u the corporation for public broadcasting. and byby contributions t your ps station from viewers like you. thank you! >> you're watching pbs.

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