The Ukraine Scandal Was in Plain Sight
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2019
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the late spring and early summer of 2019 there were these stories. Stories that ran in the New York Times and BuzzFeed News about Rudy Giuliani and his backchannel campaign to get Ukraine’s help securing Donald Trump’s re-election. Though not easy reads these articles are undoubtedly the first draft of what Washington can’t stop talking about now, the Ukraine Scandal. So, what made the whistleblower’s version of the story stick?
Guest: Eric Umansky, Deputy Managing Editor at ProPublica and Editor of the Trump, Inc. podcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, this episode contains just the tiniest bit of salty language. Okay, here's the show. |
| 0:11.3 | Eric Umanski is an editor at ProPublica, works on the Trump Inc. podcast with WNYC. |
| 0:17.0 | And back in the summer, he started noticing these stories in the New York Times, in BuzzFeed, stories about Rudy Giuliani pushing to get Ukraine's help securing Donald Trump's re-election. |
| 0:29.2 | I remember reading it honestly and looking at it. I mean, just like my honest thing, I was like, wait, on the one hand, I had this internal voice being like, wait, this is a big deal because it's, I think it's the president's lawyer suborning foreign policy for political interest. |
| 0:46.9 | I think. But not everybody is saying that. So like, I'm missing something here. And like, oh, look, there's another tab. There's another story. |
| 0:55.0 | I got to go to that. Okay. And you are an investigative editor. How long have you been doing this? |
| 1:00.8 | I've been doing it a long time. When Eric says he's been doing this a long time, he means 20 plus years. |
| 1:08.0 | And still, he'd look at these stories and think, in Trump's Washington, is this a big deal? |
| 1:13.7 | But this early reporting, it was undoubtedly the first draft of the story we all can't stop talking |
| 1:19.4 | about now. The story of a president who seems to be enlisting a foreign government to interfere in |
| 1:24.6 | domestic politics. Looking back, it's hard not to wonder what made the whistleblowers version of the story |
| 1:31.0 | so much stickier. |
| 1:32.9 | I think it's like some weird combination of, this is simpler to understand. |
| 1:38.4 | It's an accretion of things. |
| 1:40.2 | It happened at the moment. |
| 1:43.9 | Also, people in power, which is to say political power, Nancy Pelosi, and then I think people in the media in top decided it was a scandal. |
| 1:57.5 | This was the thing. |
| 1:58.9 | And then it gets elevated. |
| 2:00.6 | And then we're like, holy shit, look at the thing. And at that point, was the thing. And then it gets elevated and then we're like, holy shit, |
| 2:02.0 | look at the thing. And at that point, all the facts that were sort of like in the air and that we |
| 2:08.0 | vaguely knew about, but didn't quite understand, you then see them in this new prism of understanding, |
| 2:13.9 | oh, okay, this is the scandal I'm supposed to pay attention to. |
... |
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