How the Whistle-Blower Complaint Almost Didn’t Happen

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It took just days for a whistle-blower complaint to prompt an impeachment inquiry of President Trump. But it took weeks for the concerns detailed in the complaint to come to light — and they nearly never did. Guest: Julian E. Barnes, who covers national security for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: The Trump administration’s handling of the accusations is certain to be scrutinized by lawmakers.President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory was “completely debunked.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is the Daily.
0:09.2	Today, it took just days for the whistleblower's complaint to trigger an impeachment inquiry
0:16.6	against President Trump. Julian Barnes on the weeks that led up to that complaint
0:23.7	and how it almost didn't happen. It's Monday, September 30. Julian, tell me about what you've
0:36.0	been reporting. Up until now, the focus has been on the whistleblower complaint and how it was
0:42.6	handled. The explosive reports of a whistleblower complaint against President Trump is raising more
0:48.8	questions than answers. How was handled by the inspector general? Yeah, so when you get into this,
0:55.2	what does it mean that they have blown through the legal deadlines? Does that in itself mean that
1:00.3	the intel agencies here are in violation of the law and what happens next? How it was handled by
1:05.9	the director of national intelligence. Did he handle it accurately when it wasn't released for so many
1:12.3	weeks? And how, you know, the Department of Justice reacted to that? Well, the Department of Justice
1:17.6	declined to look into the allegations in the whistleblower's complaint. Does Bill Barr's behavior on
1:23.5	this raise and a red flags for you? But what I was interested in is what happened before the complaint
1:29.8	was filed? What happened between July 25th when President Trump has the call with the Ukrainian
1:36.8	president in August 12th when the whistleblower complaint was filed? It could have been a really
1:44.9	simple story of conscientious worker finds out about wrongdoing, mulls what to do, learns that the
1:52.8	whistleblower system exists and decides to submit a complaint. But that's not what happened.
2:00.4	We found out about a very different story. And what was that story? Immediately after the July
2:09.6	25th call, there's concern in the White House. Officials who have heard it are worried about what
2:15.8	they have heard. This is not right. This appears to be a potential abuse of power. And we learned
2:24.4	that a CIA officer who used to work in the White House had learned about something
2:31.9	amiss in that July 25th call. At least a couple people talk to the CIA officer, tell him about this
	...

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