This Week in Impeachment: Storming the SCIF
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We survey this week’s developments: the testimony from Ambassador Bill Taylor, a stunt at the SCIF, and what the founding fathers might have thought of our reticence to impeach.
Guests: Dahlia Lithwick and Jim Newell.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, listener. Welcome to What Next Impeachment Edition. Quick heads up, we curse a little tiny bit. |
| 0:10.4 | Last week in impeachment. |
| 0:14.7 | The Democrats charged ahead. The position of the House as it stands now is just we're going to charge ahead full steam. They want to do things as soon as possible by the end of the year. |
| 0:24.6 | But this week, they faced the full tilt Republican response. |
| 0:29.2 | It's through those hidden closed doors over there, Adam Schiff is trying to impeach a president of the United States behind closed doors. |
| 0:39.7 | It's been in there for 10 hours. I can assure you there was no quid pro quo. |
| 0:44.0 | I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next? I have got Dali Lithwick and Jim Newell right back in |
| 0:49.1 | the studio with me. We're going to tell you why Ambassador William Taylor's testimony |
| 0:52.8 | seemed to touch off so much drama and why a bunch of Republicans broke into their own secure meeting room. |
| 1:00.3 | Stick with us. |
| 1:05.1 | Okay, happy impeachment, everybody. |
| 1:10.3 | We're back again. |
| 1:12.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:14.6 | Okay, so everything that happened this week, when I looked at it, it seemed to revolve around and arise from the testimony of one guy. |
| 1:24.4 | U.S. ambassador William Taylor, some people call him Bill. Do you guys think we can call him Bill? What should we call him? I call him Charged Affairs Bill. That's very fun. |
| 1:35.0 | So, it was so French. How do you like my accent? That was good. It was good. It was good. Okay, so his opening statement, which is basically all we have to go on, but it's 15 pages long, so it's not nothing. |
| 1:48.0 | It read like a detective's notebook. It was the piece by piece story of how Bill Taylor, grizzled public servant, takes this job as ambassador to the Ukraine or charged affairs, even though he |
| 2:03.8 | worries, you know, this isn't going to be a great fit. And then he slowly realizes, from his |
| 2:08.9 | perspective at least, how bad things are. And he sets himself up as like a real defender of |
| 2:14.2 | Ukraine. He has this very romantic kind of moment where he goes to a bridge and he can |
| 2:19.0 | see Russian forces over on the other side. And he realizes aid isn't coming through to Ukraine. |
| 2:26.9 | And it's sort of this story of how he pieces together what's happening. So I'm wondering for |
... |
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