-Today, we got to see the damning whistle-blower complaint
that sparked the impeachment inquiry
over President Trump's Ukraine scandal.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-So, yesterday, we saw the memo from Trump's phone call
with the president of Ukraine,
and it was already incredibly damning.
The memo revealed a quid quo pro in which Trump dangled
hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid,
and in return, pressured the leader of Ukraine
to investigate a political rival, Joe Biden,
by literally telling the president of Ukraine
to "do us a favor."
And as a general rule, you never want to do Trump a favor
because it will always go unpaid.
In fact, it will very likely be punished
because Trump will take a liking to you,
make you part of his entourage,
and destroy your dignity and reputation.
I mean, just look at Rudy Giuliani.
The guy used to be America's mayor,
and now he's constantly on TV
looking like he just fell ass first onto a railroad spike.
[ Laughter ]
And then we got to see the full declassified
whistle-blower complaint that details a series
of illegal actions designed to get Ukraine to interfere
in the 2020 election and then to orchestrate
a cover-up of those actions,
and you'll never guess who was in the middle of it all.
-From the whistle-blower who says,
"In the course of my official duties,
I have received information
from multiple U.S. Government officials
that the president of the United States
is using the power of his office
to solicit interference from a foreign country
in the 2020 U.S. Election."
-This interference includes, among other things,
pressuring a foreign country to investigate
one of the president's main domestic political rivals.
The president's personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani,
is the central figure in this effort.
-This person says they heard from multiple U.S. officials
that they were deeply concerned by what they viewed
as Mr. Giuliani's circumvention
of national security decision making processes
to engage with Ukrainian officials
and relay messages back and forth
between Ukraine and the president.
-Amazing, they concocted an illegal scheme
to extort the Ukrainian government
to help them win the 2020 election,
and they chose as their go-between, Rudy Giuliani.
[ Laughter ]
That's like if you planned a bank heist
and made Mr. Magoo your getaway driver.
"Magoo, where's the car?"
[ As Mr. Magoo ] Car?
I thought we were using skis!
[ Applause ]
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] Then in the hearing this morning,
the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire,
was grilled about his handling of the whistle-blower complaint,
and specifically Giuliani's role in the scandal.
And Maguire said even he, an intelligence official
at the highest levels of government,
had no idea what Rudy was doing.
-Were you aware of his role or understanding
what his role was, doing what you do?
-Congressman Quigley, my only knowledge
of what Mr. Giuliani does, I have to be honest with you,
I get from TV and from the news media.
-Congressman, all I know about Mr. Giuliani
is what I see on TV, and, so, all I can say is I hope
he gets his narcolepsy cured soon.
[ Laughter ]
I mean, lookit, why does he always look like
he's being woken up in the middle of a question?
[ Laughter and applause ]
Of course, this would all --
this would all seem like a shocking abuse of power
and obviously impeachable behavior to any normal person,
and yet during the hearing today,
Republicans on the committee chose instead
to defend the president like Congressman Devin Nunes,
who concocted an insane lie about how Democrats
had also supposedly worked with Ukrainians
to dig up dirt on Trump.
-Today, they accused the president
of pressuring Ukrainians to take actions
that would help himself or hurt his political opponents.
And yet, there are numerous examples of Democrats
doing the exact same thing.
Democrats on this very committee
negotiated with people who they thought were Ukrainians
in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.
-I assure you, no one wants nude pictures of Donald Trump.
[ Laughter and applause ] In fact, nude pictures
of Donald Trump are the one thing
that should be literally covered up.
Also, if nude pictures of Trump existed,
the first person to show them to us would be Donald Trump.
[ Laughter ]
Maybe that's why Rudy always looks like that --
Trump just showed him the nude pics.
[ As Trump ] Rudy, check these out.
I just got these developed.
Oh, look, by the way, I broke my thumb.
[ Laughter ]
That's not my thumb, Rudy.
You think you're looking at my thumb.
But that's not my thumb. I tricked you, Rudy.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] But it's not just Rudy Giuliani's involvement
that's detailed in the whistle-blower complaint.
There are also explosive details in the report
about the lengths to which the White House went
to cover up their scheme.
Now, remember, they keep saying
there's nothing wrong in the phone call
and everything Trump did was appropriate,
and yet today, we found out that the Trump team
actually went out of their way to take the notes of the call
and hide them by moving them from the place
they're normally kept to a high security location
where very few people would see them.
-Here is where the alleged cover-up comes in,
"In the days following the call,
I learned from multiple U.S. officials
that senior White House officials had intervened
to lock down all records of the phone call,
especially the official word for word transcript
of the call that was produced, as is customary,
by the White House situation room."
-The whistle-blower reports that "the White House officials
told me that they were directed by the White House lawyers
to remove the electronic transcript
from the computer system
in which such transcripts are typically stored."
-The transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system,
when White House officials describe the act
as an abuse of this electronic system
because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive
from a national security perspective.
-They took the notes out of the normal system
used for calls like this and tried to lock them down by
putting them into a classified system to hide them,
which makes it incredibly obvious
that this was a cover-up.
It's like if your husband had a folder on his desktop
that said, "Work stuff, not porn."
[ Laughter ]
I mean, honestly, we're so lucky these guys
are terrible at cover-ups.
it was so obvious, people caught onto it immediately.
The president had a phone call, and then his staff was like,
"Put it in a separate system,"
and a bunch of people were like, "Why?"
And Trump's staff was like, "Uh, no reason."
And then Rudy Giuliani went on TV,
woke up from his nap, and screamed,
"We did a cover-up!"
[ Laughter ]
And apparently, this wasn't even the first time they've tried
to cover up something like this.
The whistle-blower wrote in their complaint
that "According to White House officials I spoke with,
this was not the first time under this administration
that a presidential transcript was placed into
this code-word-level system
solely for the purpose of protecting
politically sensitive
rather than national security sensitive information."
so they have a secret system where they keep
politically sensitive information.
Is that also where they keep Trump's eyeglass prescription?
-10,000 known or suspested gang members...
Controlled by large derners...
Advising lawmarkers...
-Yes, yes.
Lawmarkers, as in when they write up articles
of impeachment, they can do it using lawmarkers.
[ Laughter ]
Now Trump is lashing out so erratically
that it's actually hard to understand what he's saying.
For example, after the hearing,
which was held by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff,
Trump said this.
-It's a disgrace to our country.
it's another witch hunt. Here we go again.
It's Adam Schiff and his crew making up stories
and sitting there, like, pious, whatever you want to call them.
-Whatever we want to call --
We don't want to call them anything.
Why does he put it on us to come up with his insults?
it's like Presidential Match Game.
Sitting there like pious blanks.
Is it...lawmakers?
I'm sorry, the answer was lawmarkers.
[ Laughter ]
And this morning...
[ Applause ]
This morning, Trump said something even more menacing
about the whistle-blower in a private meeting with diplomats.
Trump reportedly called the whistle-blower a spy
and suggested they should be punished for treason.
-This morning, while at a private event in New York,
the "L.A. Times" is reporting that the president
called the whistle-blower almost a spy,
along with anybody who might have helped that person.
The president went on to say,
"you know what we used to do in the old days
when we were smart, right?
The spies and treason, we used to handle it
a little differently than we do now."
-Holy [bleep]
We may not have Trump's nude pics,
but we're definitely seeing a dic-tator!
Tator -- dictator.
Trump wasn't the only one losing his mind this morning.
After the release of the whistle-blower report,
a reporter for "The Atlantic" tweeted that Rudy Giuliani
called her today and that Giuliani
"was nearly shouting in my phone call with him,
'It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero
and I'm not, and I will be the hero.
These morons, when this is over,
I will be the hero,' he told me.
I had this conversation while in an Uber.
And when I hung up, the driver was like,
'Uh, everything okay?'"
I mean, not only is Rudy meddling in elections,
now he's meddling in people's Uber ratings.
[ Laughter ]
Hey, I'm sorry, if you got to talk to Giuliani,
I got to give you one star."
So now Democrats have even more explosive new evidence
for the impeachment inquiry.
And now we're moving full steam ahead with that inquiry.
Trump, of course, is losing his mind.
Yesterday, for example,
he attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
and even bizarrely claimed
she was no longer the Speaker of the House.
-Did you ask House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
to find a way out of impeachment yesterday?
-Not at all. No.
Look, she's lost her way.
She's been taken over by the radical left.
She may be radical left, herself,
but she really has lost her way.
All she's thinking about is this.
She's been taken over by the radical left,
the whole Democrat Party.
You take a look at what's happening in the media today.
The whole party is taken over by the left,
and Nancy Pelosi, as far as I'm concerned,
unfortunately, she's no longer the Speaker of the House.
-Well, unfortunately for you,
she very much is the Speaker of the House.
[ Cheers and applause ] She is. I mean...
He's such a bratty teen.
I'm surprised he didn't add,
"I'm going to my room, and I'm never coming out,
and as far as I'm concerned, you're no longer my mom."
[ Laughter ]
In fact, Trump is lashing out so wildly that yesterday,
he tried to take the rest of the White House
down with him when out of nowhere,
he dragged Vice President Mike Pence into his mess.
Now, Mike pence is an expert
at managing to stay out of the fray.
Remember that oval office meeting with Pelosi and Schumer
where Pence basically tried to teleport himself away
until it was over?
And yet, yesterday, when Trump was asked
about his conversations with the president of Ukraine,
in which Trump asked him to meddle in the 2020 election
in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars
in military aid, Trump, out of nowhere,
dragged Pence into his mess.
-I think you should ask for V.P. Pence's conversation
because he had a couple of conversations also.
I can save you a lot of time. They were all perfect.
Nothing was mentioned of any import
other than congratulations.
But the word is that they're going to ask for
the first phone conversation.
You can have it any time you need it.
And also Mike Pence's conversations,
which were, I think, one or two of them.
They were perfect.
-Damn, he's taking Mike Pence down with him.
It's like when the cops separate two suspects in a murder case.
The one guy's like, "I'll never talk,"
and the other guy is like,
[ As Trump ] You should talk to Mike Pence.
It was all his idea.
[ Normal voice ] And it's not just Mike Pence who is now
implicated in this whole mess.
There is also Attorney General William Barr.
Yesterday, we learned that Trump's Ukraine call
was referred to the Department of Justice
as a possible crime, and that Barr's team shut it down.
Barr was also mentioned multiple times in the notes
from the phone call and then in the report released today,
the whistle-blower said explicitly
that Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well,
which means Barr may have been lying during this exchange
with Senator Kamala Harris back in May.
-Has the president or anyone at the White House
ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?
Yes or no, please, sir.
-Um, the president or anybody else.
-Seems you'd remember something like that
and be able to tell us.
-Yeah, but I'm trying to grapple with the word, suggest.
I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there
that -- they have not asked me to open an investigation,
but -- -Perhaps they've suggested?
-I don't know. I wouldn't say, suggest.
-Hinted? -I don't know.
-Inferred?
You don't know. Okay.
-I mean, look at her face.
She's questioning him the way you ask your son,
"Do you smoke weed?" when you've already found the weed.
[ Laughter ]
But for real, you know someone's lying
when that's how they respond.
It's like if your boss at Kinkos comes to you and says,
"Hey, Brad, did you get drunk, sit on the copier,
photocopy your ass, and put it up in the break room?"
and your answer is, "Uh [Mumbling]
[ Laughter ]
Yeah, I'm just trying to grapple with the word 'photocopy'."
[ Laughter ]
Yeah. It was you then.
You put it up in the break room.
[ Cheers and applause ] And then there is
the State Department's role in all of this.
For example, in an interview on Fox News this week,
Giuliani actually admitted that the State Department
was also involved in this scandal
by asking him to take a phone call with an official
in Ukraine to manufacture a baseless smear against Biden.
-You didn't get involved in this on your own.
Did our State Department ask you to go on a mission for them?
-They did.
-Oh, my God, Rudy, why do you keep going on TV
and confessing this stuff?
[ Laughter ]
Here's my theory -- when Rudy and Trump
and their cohorts are huddled in the White House
or on Air Force One,
they all make perfect sense to each other, right?
They don't even realize the plans they're making are crimes.
It's like when you and your friends take mushrooms
in the back bedroom and you're throwing theories around.
You feel like geniuses.
Then you leave the bedroom,
but you forgot your mom's having her book club.
And suddenly the moment they all look at you,
you realize, "Oh, no, we're really [bleep] high."
[ Laughter ]
I mean, seriously, that fast. He gives it up that fast.
Can you imagine Rudy's episode of "Law & Order"?
[ "The Clang" plays ]
-Did our State Department ask you to go on a mission for them?
-They did.
[ Outro for "Law & Order" plays ]
[ Laughter and applause ]
-Then, Rudy admitted again during an interview on Fox News,
where he literally held up his phone to show his calls
from the State Department.
That came after a "Washington Post" report
in which White House insiders
tried to blame Rudy for everything.
According to those insiders,
the person who appears to have been more directly involved
in nearly every stage
of the entanglement with Ukraine is Giuliani.
"Rudy, he did all of this," one U.S. official said.
"This [bleep] show that we're in,
it's him injecting himself into the process."
Oh, man, I love it.
They're all trying to blame each other now.
This is like the end of "Reservoir Dogs"
where everybody's pointing a gun at someone else.
You've got Mr. Orange. He's blaming Mr. White.
And everybody's mad at Mr. Red.
[ Laughter ]
What we saw today in this whistle-blower complaint
is impeachable behavior on its own,
let alone all the other ways in which Trump
has abused his power over the last two years.
And now that things are getting really bad,
they're trying to pin it on each other
with the White House blaming Rudy,
Rudy blaming the State Department,
and Trump blaming Pence.
In fact, if both Trump and Pence get removed from office,
the next person in the line of succession
would be Nancy Pelosi, in which case,
it would actually be true that...
-She's no longer the Speaker of the House.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪