Welcome to Ukraine-gate, the latest allegation of corruption in President Donald Trump’s administration and a uniquely confusing chapter in the commander in chief’s tense relationship with the men and women of the US intelligence community.
The burgeoning scandal swept into public view 10 days ago with an odd, unexpected Friday night letter from House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff. Addressed to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, the letter discusses an apparent whistle-blower complaint, filed to the intelligence community’s inspector general last month, of what’s known as “urgent concern”—specific legal language that normally triggers congressional involvement. Except the House committee had yet to receive any complaint, and so Schiff’s letter was accompanied by a subpoena for the information Maguire was refusing to share.
“Even though the disclosure was made by an individual within the intelligence community through lawful channels, you have improperly withheld that disclosure on the basis that, in your view, the complaint concerns conduct by someone outside of the intelligence community and because the complaint involves confidential and potentially privileged communications,” Schiff wrote.
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Since then, reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal has filled in some of the details of that whistle-blower complaint, suggesting that it centers at least in part on communications between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The revelations have brought renewed scrutiny to relations between the two countries, particularly Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine until earlier this month, as well as a long-running effort by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to encourage investigations into Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had connections to an energy company there. According to the WSJ, on a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden eight times.
Trump confirmed to reporters Sunday that he did bring up the Bidens on that call, but insisted there was “no quid pro quo.” It’s also worth noting that allegations of impropriety in Ukraine by either Biden have been soundly dismissed by those who have followed the matter most closely; Ukraine’s top prosecutor told Bloomberg in May that he had no evidence of wrongdoing.
If you’ve struggled to keep up with these developments, you’re hardly alone.
At the end of the day, though, the scandal boils down to this: The US president is alleged to have used the weight of his office to pressure a foreign nation into investigating a political opponent. If true, such behavior would clearly represent an abuse of power, precisely among the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the nation's founders intended to be an impeachable offense.
“I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment,” Schiff, whose outrage with the administration has been remarkably restrained, told CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend. “But if the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time that he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit—that is, providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign—then that may be the only remedy that is co-equal to the evil that conduct represents.”
Maguire is set to testify before Congress later this week. So far he has refused to hand over the whistle-blower information to Congress, even as the law appears to leave him little room to stonewall Schiff and his committee. Trump, in tried and true fashion, has dismissed the whole thing as “Ukraine witch hunt.” On Monday, he publicly wondered about the whistle-blower, "Is he on our Country’s side. Where does he come from."
The Ukraine scandal, as it unfurls, brings together two central and ongoing problems of the Trump administration: foreign interference in US elections, and the White House’s tense relationship with its own intelligence community.
As acting DNI, Maguire oversees a $60 billion intelligence apparatus made up of tens of thousands of nonpartisan, career civil servants spread across 17 different agencies. They show up to work each day to keep the country safe and ensure the president has access to the best information that technology and human sources can provide. They are also people to whom Trump often refers, insultingly and inaccurately, as the “deep state”—an obscure phrase that Trump has so popularized that Merriam-Webster added it this month to the dictionary, defining it as “an alleged secret governmental network operating extralegally.”
Maguire was pushed into his role in August, after Trump ousted both the previous DNI Dan Coats and his principal deputy, Sue Gordon. Now he has found himself torn between the president he’s supposed to serve and the people he’s supposed to lead.
Trump’s distrust of the intelligence community dates back to his campaign, a feeling heightened during the transition when the nation’s intelligence chiefs briefed him on the Steele dossier. As president, Trump has regularly railed against the intel agencies, including spreading spurious allegations that his offices at Trump Tower were wiretapped by the US government.
Meanwhile, the intelligence community has had to grapple with the possibility that the commander in chief himself represents a national security risk. Whether Trump can be trusted with the nation’s biggest secrets remains an open question, especially since he blabbed about an Israeli operation to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office a day after firing FBI director James Comey for failing to shut down the investigation of his national security advisor.
Similarly concerning, Trump has kept notes private from his meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin and refused to allow Americans to accompany him to some of those conversations—remarkable departures from normal practices. Then, of course, after US intelligence officials concluded Russia had been behind attacks on the 2016 election, Trump stood next to Putin at a press conference in Helsinki and said he believed the Russian president’s denials instead. Moreover, top national security officials have been told not even to mention to the president threats that are politically inconvenient to him. He’s reportedly encouraged homeland security officials to break the law, saying that he’ll pardon them if they’re caught. (A Trump official later said he was “joking.”)
Despite all of those previous problems, the allegations levied in the wake of the whistle-blower news—that the president was wielding the power of American foreign policy to punish a political opponent and benefit himself in a reelection campaign— would be the most blatant example of corruption to emerge yet from the Trump administration. National security officials should be additionally concerned over these allegations because they run exactly counter to long-standing US foreign policy goals. Trump appears to prioritize his own political future over both the West’s traditional hopes for Ukraine to develop as a just, democratic society with strong institutions, as well as the new Ukrainian president’s own political mandate to clean up rampant corruption.
It’s shocking, but it’s hardly surprising.
Pretending to be newly outraged that Donald Trump might do such a thing is like expressing surprise when someone just acquitted of bank robbery on a technicality is arrested the next day robbing another bank. Brazen, sure—but surprising? Not really.
Trump already asked for foreign help in public during his first election campaign, with his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” request (which was promptly acted upon). And now with the power of the presidency behind him, Trump’s all but told the world that he’s going to recruit all the foreign help he can for his reelection. He has stated he sees nothing wrong with it, telling ABC News, “If somebody called from a country, Norway—‘We have information on your opponent’—oh, I think I’d want to hear it.” Even his son-in-law Jared Kushner has said he wouldn’t necessarily report foreign help to the FBI.
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The question of whether the Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russia during the 2016 election was the subject of a two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The special counsel’s office narrowly defined a foreign conspiracy as requiring an explicit agreement of cooperation between two parties—something it did not find between Trump campaign officials and Russia, despite the former’s willingness to receive the help. On July 24, Mueller testified about his findings to Congress, bringing an end to the probe. The very next day, Trump spoke to the Ukrainian president by phone.
Donald Trump now knows precisely what he can get away with. The Brookings Institution’s Bill Galston argued over the weekend to the Post, “He appears to be daring the rest of the political system to stop him—and if it doesn’t, he’ll go further.”
Based on what we know, Congress is right to consider the whistle-blower complaint a serious matter. Whistle-blowers don’t take formal complaints lightly. As much as lawmakers and officials praise those who expose corruption or malfeasance, becoming a whistle-blower in the intelligence world is a process that almost inevitably ends one’s career, no matter the validity of the disclosure.
And congressional Democrats may well be preparing further action. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has spent the year holding the impeachment ambitions of her caucus in check, but she sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to the House over the weekend. It said, in part, “If the administration persists in blocking this whistle-blower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the president, they’ll be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.”
This “new chapter of lawlessness” underscores a core irony of the “swampiness” that Donald Trump has brought to Washington during his three years in the White House: The very political corruption that he railed against as a candidate, the very behavior he said was rampant in Washington and promised to clean up by “draining the swamp” has actually unfolded primarily at his own hands. His own administration has seen dramatic cases of self-dealing, official grifting, Cabinet secretaries living high on the government dole, and nepotism galore. His campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national security advisor, and foreign policy aides have all ended up in courtrooms for conspiracy, corruption, and money-laundering charges. And it’s his day-to-day behavior that breaks norms and ignores the legitimate oversight by Congress and status as an co-equal branch of government. He has driven career government officials to speak out in protest, and out of grave concern.
In fact, the Ukraine scandal makes abundantly clear that in the US, at least, there’s really just a deep state of one: The only person undermining Donald Trump’s presidency is Trump himself.