--:-- [Sound of a news theme plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I'm Andrew Prokop, and I'll be covering the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump for Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andrew, the trial is finally underway. Let's talk about what's been happening in the lead-up to this moment.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So, the president got impeached in late December. It's now late January, and his trial finally begins today in earnest. What happened in the interim?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, we had a bit of a standoff. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after the House passed the impeachment articles, she held them up and did not send them to the Senate right away.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's right. She announced that she wasn't going to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. And Trump was indeed very angry about this. He sent a lot of angry tweets about this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Crazy Nancy Pelosi should spend more time in her decaying city and less time on the impeachment hoax.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But what happened was that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, didn't budge. He would not negotiate with Democrats over the witness issue. And he locked down the votes of enough Republican senators in his conference to be able to do what he needed to do, which is to pass a plan for the first phase of the Senate trial and how it will work that will happen today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Pelosi lost. This gamble did not pay off. There will not be witnesses in the Senate trial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's not actually so clear. So Pelosi did not succeed in winning preemptive concessions from McConnell into how the trial will be set up. But the witness issue remains conspicuously unresolved.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Democrats' demand was to agree to call four witnesses up front, including John Bolton. But McConnell's position was a bit more subtle.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He said that he does not want the Senate to make a decision on witnesses one way or the other until after the trial begins, until after there are opening arguments and a period of questioning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His stance is that this is how it was done for Bill Clinton impeachment trial in 1999 so it makes sense to do it now.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Democrats have cried foul because back then pretty much every witness of relevance to the Monica Lewinsky slash Ken Starr investigation had already been questioned. And in the Trump impeachment inquiry, there were several witnesses who refused to testify or who the Trump administration ordered not to testify.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Democrats say it's a different situation right now. The perfect place for them to testify is in the Senate, so they should do it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the holdup right now is that some of the more independent-minded or moderate Senate Republicans are not yet ready to agree to no witnesses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So McConnell is hoping that once the trial kicks off, we go through a few days of this, everyone kind of gets bored and tired of this, and then they agree to just throw in the towel, cut things off, and go to a verdict.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Let's talk about the president's defense for a moment here. He sort of finalized his legal team last week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who's on it? Any familiar names?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Oh, yeah. So there is, in addition to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who sent the infamous letter saying there would be no cooperation with the impeachment inquiry to Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's also Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, who's been representing him since the Mueller investigation.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And a few more staffers in the White House counsel's office. But the big names were the outside picks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's unclear what capacity exactly they'll be in or how much of a role they'll have on Trump's team.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But they are on Trump's team. And they include Ken Starr, who famously was the independent counsel whose investigation led to Bill Clinton's impeachment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Trump has not committed any crimes whatsoever. This has been an impeachment in search of a label.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How did Monica Lewinsky react to that selection?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She tweeted, this is definitely an are you fucking kidding me kind of day.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Who else is on Team Trump? Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr in the independent counsel role.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Alan Dershowitz, who has been defending Trump a lot on TV.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The critical point is that obstruction of Congress and abuse of power are clearly not within what the framers intended.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I will lay out that argument quite clearly with sources.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I'm sure my other members of the Trump team will do the same.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, he's a Harvard Law professor, defended O.J. Simpson.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He defended Jeffrey Epstein, and his name has come up in the Epstein scandal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think Trump wanted a really big name celebrity lawyer on his team.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that's why he picked Dershowitz.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the other side of this, we have the impeachment managers whom Nancy Pelosi picked last week.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Who did she end up picking?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she picked seven members of the House of Representatives.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The leader of the team is Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jerry Nadler, chair of House Judiciary.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Speaker Zolofkin, Chair Zolofkin, Chair of the House Committee on House Administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chair Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Congresswoman Val Demings of Florida, Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia of Texas, Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado was a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it's a set of members who are pretty close to leadership, who are a little more restrained in their style, not liberal partisan bomb throwers necessarily.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm very proud and honored that these seven members, distinguished members, have accepted this serious responsibility.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Before we get to Lev Parnas and all the things he spilled on national TV last week, I wonder, you know, this doesn't happen very often.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You made some parallels to the Clinton impeachment trial. Is there anything else here that's sort of exceptional, extraordinary about the way this will proceed in the next few days and weeks?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So McConnell's plan, as I mentioned, is to try and get this thing over with as quickly as possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Initially, he proposed that each side would get 24 hours split over just two days, which would imply two 12-hour days.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And there was a lot of outrage and pushback.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So today he announced that there would be a last minute change and the 24 hours of floor time for each side would be split over a maximum of three days.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Still, McConnell is trying, it seems, to move this thing along as quickly as he can to try and get Trump acquitted by the time of his State of the Union address, which is two weeks from today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Madam Speaker, the President of the United States. More with Andrew in a minute.
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--:-- Andrew Prokop: Andrew Prokop, let's talk about Lev Parnas. He's been on TV a bunch lately.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Four and a half million Americans tuned in to watch Lev Parnas go face to face with Rachel Maddow.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Just part of a media blitz to get this story out. Remind the folks at home who he is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Parnas was born in the former Soviet Union, immigrated to the U.S. at a pretty young age.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And has been bouncing around through various grifts and scams over the past few decades until he somehow came into a lot of money and started donating it to Republicans in the last few years and Trump's super PAC and eventually paid $500,000 to Rudy Giuliani to get into his inner circle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then Parnas and Giuliani became essentially joined at the hip.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Parnas had another guy who was very close to Igor Fruman, who he always went around with Giuliani with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Parnas and Fruman essentially opened doors for Giuliani to top Ukrainian officials.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And this involved these Ukrainians making accusations about Joe and Hunter Biden and supposed Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election to hurt Donald Trump and other matters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And essentially, these accusations they've been peddling, they generally aren't viewed as very credible, but they were what Trump wanted to hear.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And they kicked off this whole scandal, basically.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Was Parnas quiet during the House impeachment hearings?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Parnas was still on the team as the impeachment inquiry kicked off on Trump's team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I idolized him. I mean, I thought he was the savior.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But then things took a turn for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Parnas and Fruman were arrested around 6 p.m. last night at Dulles Airport as they were about to board an international flight with one-way tickets.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it turned out that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York had been investigating their activities for some time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As alleged in the indictment, the defendants broke the law to gain political influence while avoiding disclosure of who was actually making the donations and where the money was coming from.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So they were suddenly facing legal trouble.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Parnas changed his posture.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In behavior that we will remember as familiar from what Michael Cohen did during the Mueller investigation, Parnas started to claim publicly through his lawyer that he had a lot of information that House Democrats might want to know and that the American public might want to know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He said he had documents. He said he had a very interesting story to tell.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It seemed that he was interested theoretically in getting immunity for his testimony from either the House impeachment investigators or in the Senate trial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or he may have been interested in trying to strike a cooperation deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York, though neither of those possibilities seem to have worked out for him so far.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So he escalated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do you think is the main inaccuracy or the main lie that's being told that you feel like you can correct?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That the president didn't know what was going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Trump knew exactly what was going on.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He was aware of all my movements.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wouldn't do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I was on the ground doing their work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he decided to turn over this trove of his text messages that are relevant to the Trump Ukraine scandal to the House impeachment investigators.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So this gave us a sense really of how Parnas, Giuliani and other key figures at the heart of this talked to each other and viewed what they were trying to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you say that the president knew about your movements and knew what you were doing, are you saying specifically, and I want to sort of drill down on that, that the president was aware that you and Mr. Giuliani were working on this effort in Ukraine to basically try to hurt Joe Biden's political career?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He knew about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it was all about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and it was never about corruption.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It was never strictly about the Burisma, which included Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think probably the top takeaway in all of this that changes our understanding of the scandal is that in addition to what we had previously understood as the two infamous quid pro quos the White House meeting in exchange for Biden dirt and the letting the military aid go through in exchange for Biden dirt there was a third one before either of them, and it involved the firing of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He even had a breakdown and screamed, fire her to Madeline, his assistant, the secretary, before he fired.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she said, Mr. President, I can't do that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He was directing the State Department to remove her and the State Department was refusing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Correct.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You'll remember that she testified in the inquiry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I do not understand Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So I think what is new in here is that the prosecutor general of Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko, was directly tying his demand for the firing of Yovanovich with his offer to provide information on something he kept referring to as B and other times as Burisma, the company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Lutsenko was worried about Yovanovitch because she had been criticizing him for corruption and he very much wanted her gone.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And we should add that eventually Lutsenko disavowed all this and said that he didn't actually see any indication that Hunter Biden broke the law in any way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has the White House responded to all this stuff coming out?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Trump has denied in the past that he knew Parnas and Giuliani has now tried to disavow him as well, saying he's lying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's in a bad situation. He's just making stuff up.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And a lot of Republicans have been saying they don't know who Lev Parnas is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what tends to happen after that is that Parnas' attorney, Joseph Bondi, tweets photos of them with Lev Parnas, of which there are an astonishing number.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Parnas appears to have been very good at getting himself photographed with quite a grin with all sorts of top Republican figures from senators like Mike Braun of Indiana, who will be a juror in this trial, to Trump, to Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Kevin McCarthy, Jeff Sessions, John Kelly, Kellyanne Godway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How can you look at what Lev Parnas says and what the documents show and what the president asked for in the summary?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There are too many to fully list here. But basically, if you are a top Republican, Lev Parnas probably has a picture of him grinning right next to you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I do not know Lev Parnas.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Oh, well, you are tempting fate there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It seems like he's really excited to talk.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Is he going to try and talk at the Senate trial?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I guess that's up to Mitch McConnell.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's up to the Senate in this question of whether to call witnesses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he certainly has said enough things that it would seem that people would want to hear from him under oath.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But even Democrats have been a little wary about hitching their wagon to Lev Parnas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Parnas is someone whose evidence, whose testimony should be questioned, challenged like any other witness.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he should be a witness. He should have his documents presented to the Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, there will certainly be some discussion about whether he should be subpoenaed for Senate testimony.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And we'll just have to see what happens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andrew, the sense we had back in December, the last time we spoke about this on the show with you, was that the president's been impeached. The Republicans will acquit no matter what.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That big picture hasn't changed, but we have gotten a few reminders that there could be a few more twists and turns before this whole thing is over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nothing has happened to sufficiently shake the rock-solid Republican support of Donald Trump just yet.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But, you know, with Bolton, with Lev Parnas, we've gotten indications that there is still more that we don't know about what happened here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And those facts could come out and it could make it even uglier for the Senate Republicans who already have their minds made up to acquit Trump to actually cast that vote.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So now the question is whether Mitch McConnell can cut this thing off and protect Trump before it gets too out of hand or whether a few Republican senators will revolt and want to hear more about this, will want to bring in those witnesses, even though what they have to say could be very uncomfortable for the president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andrew Prokop will be covering the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump for Vox.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You can follow along at Vox.com or on Twitter. He is at AWProkop.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's cop with a K. I'm Sean Ramasverham, Ramasverham with a W.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is Ukraine Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You
