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OBSESSION UPDATE: Again, thank you for all the support you’ve shown for my new book, “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War On Trump.” In the memo this week, I’ve gone through some of the main revelations in the book, from President Trump’s broken relationship with then-FBI Director James Comey to the origins of the Mueller investigation to the effect Mueller’s cognitive decline had on the probe to the dramatic “war” showdown between the Trump and Mueller teams.
Now, it looks like we’ll learn more about one of the book’s subjects. In “Obsession,” I report that Capitol Hill Republicans came to believe that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the White House national security council official who listened to Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was the spark that started the entire impeachment investigation. Now comes the announcement that Vindman, out of the White House and the Army altogether, will give his first-ever media interview, Monday night on NBC Nightly News. Why now? It’s not clear, but everybody is talking with an election approaching. I’ll give you an update when it happens.
Meanwhile, there are still more new stories in “Obsession.” One concerns the relationship of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy during impeachment. The short version: There wasn’t one. The two never had a substantive talk on impeachment throughout the entire drama.
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When I asked whether he talked to the Speaker about impeachment, McCarthy answered, “Steny and I have real conversations,” referring to the number two Democratic leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer. With Pelosi, it wasn’t the same. “Hers is happy talk,” McCarthy said of their conversations. “When we’re together, she starts talking about the weather. It’s embarrassing what we talk about. It’s nervous talk.” The two could never muster even one serious discussion of impeachment — that’s just how things worked on Capitol Hill.
“Chairman? Jerry? Chairman?” Things were just as bad in the committees. In one heated moment, House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler hung up on ranking Republican Doug Collins. The two were arguing over how many law professors would be invited to testify at one of only two hearings the committee held on impeachment. “I was just asking for one more law professor,” Collins recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t do that, Doug. I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Mr. Chairman, this is just not inherently fair. Finally, I said, ‘I have to say this one more time–‘ and on the other end, I heard him say, ‘That’s all I can say’ — CLICK. He hung up on me.” “He just flat hung up on me,” Collins recalled with a laugh. “I remember standing in my front yard, and he hung up, and I was saying, ‘Chairman? Jerry? Chairman?'”
In the overheated Intelligence Committee, there was a chaotic standoff in which chairman Adam Schiff and top Republican Devin Nunes would not speak to each other without the presence of a lawyer. It happened during a wild scene on October 23, 2019, when dozens of Republican lawmakers staged a sit-in inside the secure room where Schiff was conducting secret impeachment depositions.
“Schiff went nuts when they came in,” Republican Intelligence Committee member Chris Stewart recalled. “Lots of yelling on both sides.” Finally, Schiff left the room. Then Stewart went to Schiff’s office. Schiff wanted Republican committee members to tell their fellow Republicans to leave. “I said, ‘No way. You’re the chairman. You go tell them,'” Stewart recalled.
Schiff then tried the same argument with Republican Jim Jordan. “He told me it was my responsibility to make them leave,” Jordan recalled. “I said, ‘No, it’s not. You’re the chairman, I’m not, and I support them being here during this testimony.” Finally, there was Nunes. “One of my lawyers says, ‘Mr. Schiff would like to speak with you,'” Nunes recalled, “and I say I can’t go in there without my general counsel and our top members. I’m not going to engage in any type of conversation with him, especially with no transcriber there.”
In other words, it was a mess. When Republicans and Democrats weren’t yelling at each other, they were refusing to talk to each other. That can happen in the event of a totally partisan impeachment. (Remember, not a single House Republican voted for the Democratic articles of impeachment.)
That’s it for now. Again, the book is available here. And yes, there is still more, and it will come out in the next few days.
