September 26, New York and Washington
Washington’s morning rush hour wasn’t yet over when the whistleblower complaint, declassified and available for anyone to read, hit the Internet just after 8:30 a.m. on September 26.
Only 15 hours earlier, members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees had to go to their SCIFs to look at the document. Now reporters throughout the capital were studying the seven-page complaint and a heavily redacted two-page appendix, dated August 12 and addressed to the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
The complaint wasn’t just about the Trump-Zelensky phone call. It was broader and more explicit in its assertions. “In the course of my official duties,” the whistleblower wrote, “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.” The president was not acting alone in this effort, the complaint said. “The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”
That was paragraph two.
The whistleblower’s knowledge, the complaint said, came from conversations with “more than half a dozen U.S. officials” who had “informed me of various facts related to this effort.”
That was paragraph three.
The whistleblower stated forthrightly that “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another. In addition, a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has been reported publicly.”
That was paragraph four.
The whistleblower had organized the complaint into four categories. First, the July 25 phone call. Then, “Efforts to restrict access to records related to the call.” Next, “Ongoing concerns.” Finally, “Circumstances leading up to the July 25 presidential call.”
The document was thorough, almost like a legal brief. It came with footnotes, including one that offered a primer on Ukrainian politics and players. It contained a series of bullet points that laid out, in chronological order and with references to press accounts, the Giuliani-led campaign to pressure the Ukrainians on matters of interest to Giuliani and President Trump. It described the aid freeze, and how that was a factor in the campaign.
The biggest news, though, was category two: “Efforts to restrict access to records relating to the call.” According to the whistleblower, “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.”
Instead of putting an electronic copy of the transcript into the usual computer, accessible to anyone with the appropriate security clearance, White House lawyers had directed that the transcript be stored on a separate network reserved for “classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”
For the whistleblower, this unusual handling was evidence that “White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.” One White House official had described the restricted access as “an abuse” because “the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”
At 8:35 a.m., Adam Schiff sent out a tweet with a link to the document. “This complaint should never have been withheld,” he wrote. “The public has a right to see the complaint and what it reveals. Read it here.”
Schiff and his staff were already feeling energized that morning by Trump’s release of the transcript. The president was telling everyone to read it. But for Schiff and his colleagues, the transcript showed that Trump had done exactly what the whistleblower had said.
Emboldened, Schiff gaveled the House Intelligence Committee to order a few minutes after 9 a.m. in hearing room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Maguire was waiting at the witness table, summoned by subpoena, to answer questions about his handling of the whistleblower’s complaint.
It was a moment made for Schiff. He was not only a former federal prosecutor used to presenting cases to a jury—in this instance, the assembled phalanx of journalists and the C-SPAN audience—but he also understood the arc of a good story. When he was a young lawyer in Los Angeles, he had done what nearly everyone dreams of doing when they move to La La Land: He wrote a screenplay.
He spent hours at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library, reading the scripts for then-popular films “Silence of the Lambs” and “Witness.” Drawing on his courtroom experience and snippets of dialogue from trials, he typed out a crime thriller. The prosecutor was the hero. Schiff called it “Minotaur.” He also wrote a Holocaust-era screenplay. Neither made it to the silver screen.
As he got deeper into the world of intelligence work during his years in Congress, he drafted a spy novel with the working title “A Man Called Seven.” Since Trump’s election, Schiff, whose district includes Hollywood, had not found the time to keep up his extracurricular writing.
Now as he faced Maguire, sitting ramrod straight after enduring a battalion of clicking cameras at the edge of the witness table, Schiff’s prosecutorial and screenwriting sides both made their appearance. The transcript and the whistleblower’s complaint had presented him with the material for a compelling narrative. Schiff felt a need to tell the story as vividly and as dramatically as he could, in language that anyone watching on television could easily grasp. He had prepared a nine-minute opening statement.
He began as prosecutor Schiff. “Yesterday, we were presented with the most graphic evidence yet that the president of the United States has betrayed his oath of office, betrayed his oath to defend our national security and betrayed his oath to defend our Constitution,” he said. Ukraine “desperately” relied on U.S. military, financial and diplomatic aid to protect itself from Russian aggression. That was why Zelensky was so frantic to get an Oval Office meeting with Trump and to keep the American aid flowing.
“And so what happened on that call?” Schiff said. “Zelensky begins by ingratiating himself, and he tries to enlist the support of the president. He expresses his interest in meeting with the president and says his country wants to acquire more weapons from us to defend itself.”
Then screenwriter Schiff took over. While working on his opening remarks in advance of the hearing, he had remembered former FBI director James Comey saying that Trump reminded him of a mafia don. Then there was Trump himself, calling his former lawyer Michael Cohen a “rat.” Seizing on the mob theme, Schiff had crafted a dramatic retelling, in his own words, of Trump’s reaction to Zelensky’s requests.
“And what is the president’s response? Well, it reads like a classic organized crime shakedown,” Schiff told the hearing room. “Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates.”
This sentence was intended as Schiff’s signal that he was not going to stick to the document, that he was going to provide “the essence of” what Trump had said. He began with Trump’s words, almost as they appeared in the transcript: “We’ve been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what, I don’t see much reciprocity here.”
Then, without stopping to say that he was now leaving the transcript behind, Schiff shifted into his scripted rewrite of Trump’s lines: “I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you, though. And I’m going to say this only seven times so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand, lots of it, on this and on that. I’m going to put you in touch with people, not just any people. I’m going to put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States, my attorney general, Bill Barr. He’s got the whole weight of the American law enforcement behind him. And I’m going to put you in touch with Rudy. You’re going to love him, trust me. You know what I’m asking, and so I’m only going to say this a few more times in a few more ways. And by the way, don’t call me again, I’ll call you when you’ve done what I asked.”
Looking pleased with his dramatic rendition, Schiff said: “This is, in sum and character, what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a graphic betrayal of the president’s oath of office. But as it does represent a real betrayal, there is nothing the president says here that is in America’s interests, after all. It is, instead, the most consequential form of tragedy, for it forces us to confront the remedy the Founders provided for such a flagrant abuse of office: impeachment.”
With the military discipline of 36 years as a Navy Seal and vice admiral, Maguire sat stoically, listening, waiting, as Schiff finished his opening monologue.
While Schiff was doing his caricature of Trump in Washington, President Trump was in New York, at a gathering of staffers and families from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, airing his grievances and thrashing the Democrats.
The declassified whistleblower’s complaint had been released less than an hour earlier, prompting the president to offer his instant analysis. “I just heard while coming up here, they have a whistleblower,” he said, drawing sympathetic giggles from the crowd eating breakfast in the InterContinental Hotel ballroom. “He turned out to be a fake, he’s a fake, a highly partisan whistleblower.”
If not for the “dishonest media,” Trump said, no one would be paying attention to this. “The whistleblower came out and said—nothing. Said ‘a couple of people told me he’ ”—Trump was referring to himself—“ ‘had a conversation with Ukraine.’ ” He paused, then escalated his attack. “We’re at war. These people are sick. They’re sick, and nobody is calling it out like I do.” As for the whistleblower, “basically that person never saw the report, never saw the call. Never saw the call. Heard something and decided that he or she or whoever the hell it is—sort of like, almost, a spy.”
The more Trump talked, the more he sounded like a Wild West sheriff gathering a posse for a “dead or alive” manhunt. “I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistleblower—who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.” That last line produced a few laughs and a few hushed murmurs.
Not everyone in the crowd was a committed supporter. This wasn’t a political rally or fundraiser. The event was intended as the president’s opportunity to thank U.N. ambassador Kelly Craft and her staff for their work during Trump’s three-day visit. Someone in the ballroom was recording the event and was alarmed enough at the president’s “hang ’em high” language to pass the audio along to reporters at the Los Angeles Times.
As Craft looked on, Trump dismissed the news media as “animals” and “scum” and “the worst human beings you’ll ever meet.” That produced a cry of “Fake news!” from somewhere in the crowd. “And then you have Sleepy Joe Biden, who’s dumb as a rock,” he said, bringing more laughter and applause from parts of the room. “This guy was dumb on his best day, and he’s not having his best day right now,” a perfect segue into repeating the allegations about Biden and his son Hunter.
Trump was riffing, having fun. He was in his element.
Inside hearing room 2154 on Capitol Hill, Maguire was delivering his opening statement. His words stood in direct opposition to Trump’s. “I want to stress,” he said, that the whistleblower had “acted in good faith,” had “done everything by the book and followed the law.”
Maguire said he took the complaint seriously, but he also felt it was his duty to inform the White House in case the president wanted to claim executive privilege. The situation, he said, was “unprecedented.”
Schiff, taking the first turn at questions, picked up a phrase that Trump had been using for nearly a week.
“Director, you don’t believe the whistleblower is a political hack, do you?” Schiff asked.
“I don’t know who the whistleblower is, Mr. Chairman,” Maguire answered, carefully. “I’ve done my utmost to protect his anonymity.”
Schiff bristled. “That doesn’t sound like much of a defense of the whistleblower here, someone you found did everything right.” He offered Maguire a second shot at the same question. “You don’t believe the whistleblower is a political hack, do you?”
“I believe the whistleblower is operating in good faith,” Maguire said, his voice rising a bit. “My job is to support and lead the entire intelligence community. That individual works for me. Therefore, it is my job to make sure that I support and defend that person.”
“You don’t have any reason to accuse them of disloyalty to our country,” Schiff said, “do you?”
Maguire, looked down, shaking his head. “Sir,” he said, looking up, his gaze steady. “Sir, absolutely not.”
The committee’s Republican members were ready to pounce as soon as Schiff finished questioning Maguire. Outside the hearing room, Schiff’s dramatic reading was already taking flak on the TV networks and the Internet.
“While the chairman was speaking, I actually had someone text me: Is he just making this up?” said Michael Turner of Ohio. “And, yes, he was, because sometimes fiction is better than the actual words or the text. But luckily the American public are smart and they have the transcript. They have read the conversation. They know when someone’s just making it up.”
Elise Stefanik of New York, an outspoken Republican on the committee, didn’t wait for her turn. She sent out a tweet as the hearing was in progress. “It is disturbing and outrageous,” she wrote, “that Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff opens up a hearing of this importance with improvised fake dialogue.”
Schiff wasn’t surprised that the Republicans were howling. Too bad. He had said he wasn’t quoting Trump’s actual words, and he was mocking a man who loves nothing more than mocking people. As soon as Turner was done, Schiff took the microphone again. “My summary of the president’s call was meant to be at least part in parody,” he said, smiling slightly. If that wasn’t clear, he said, “that’s a separate problem.”
Now Schiff was going to make it abundantly clear. “Of course, the president never said, ‘If you don’t understand me, I’m going to say it seven more times.’ My point is that’s the message that the Ukraine president was receiving in not so many words.”
But Schiff was too late. He had handed the Republicans an unexpected talking point. Instead of talking about Trump and the whistleblower complaint, the hearing was now focusing on Schiff and his “parody.” Next up on the Republican side was Brad Wenstrup, also from Ohio. Before asking Maguire any questions, Wenstrup took direct aim at Schiff.
“You know, I think it’s a shame that we started off this hearing with fictional remarks,” Wenstrup said, “putting words into it that did not exist, that are not in the transcript. And I will contend that those were intentionally not clear.” He paused. “The chairman described it as parody, and I don’t believe that this is the time or the place for parody when we are trying to seek facts.”
The pummeling was happening simultaneously online, where Republican House members had taken to social media with both thumbs. Ralph Norman of South Carolina: “How stupid does he think the American people are?” Scalise tweeted: “Dems are literally making stuff up now because they have no legitimate reason to impeach @realDonaldTrump.”
Ronna Romney McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee and Senator Mitt Romney’s niece, weighed in, too: “Absolutely disgraceful for Adam Schiff to dismiss his lies about @realDonaldTrump’s call with the Ukrainian President as ‘parody.’ Schiff willfully misled the American people and he should retract immediately!”
The hearing went on, with several more hours of questioning. Schiff’s parody kept coming back into play. At about 1 p.m., Air Force One landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland after the flight back from New York. Trump told the waiting reporters he had been watching the hearing. “Here we go again,” he said. “It’s Adam Schiff and his crew making up stories and sitting there like pious whatever you want to call them. It’s just a—really, it’s a disgrace.”
The Republicans were having a field day at Schiff’s expense.
By the time Trump was back at the White House, the Los Angeles Times had published the president’s “spies and treason” comments. A few hours later, the recording itself was posted.
Encouraged by Trump’s loose talk about possible punishment for a treasonous mole—“You know what we used to do in the old days”—some of the president’s online supporters were already gearing up to find the whistleblower and publish the name. On the pro-Trump Reddit message board “r/The_Donald,” a post using a pseudonym said, “This ‘whistleblower’ needs to be put in the public spotlight, and then f---ing prosecute him/her to the fullest extent of the law.”
The quest to identify the whistleblower soon grew into a fixation across the more extreme corners of such platforms as Twitter, Reddit and Gab. It spread to conservative news sites, radio shows and TV broadcasts, but online, it quickly descended into a case study of the Internet at its most disturbing.
On the 4chan message board, a commenter asserted that “the whistleblower is not white,” although the complaint gave no hint about race or gender. Many were sure it was a woman. Others insisted on Hispanic or Jewish or Arab. Names flew, without proof, mostly a few of the better-known names from the obvious agencies—the CIA, NSC, the State Department.
It was more than just a guessing game. If the online sleuths were to “out” the whistleblower, the consequences could be serious. Targets of online harassment campaigns had had their addresses, Social Security numbers, names of children or other family members put into the public domain. Major news outlets had decided not to publish the whistleblower’s name, partly because of safety concerns, partly because the federal law protected the anonymity of whistleblowers.
Schiff had vowed, in his tweet releasing the complaint, that his committee would do “everything we can to protect this courageous whistleblower.” Pelosi had made a similar pledge at a late-morning news conference. “I’ve been an important part of writing bills to protect whistleblowers from retaliation, and that’s what we hope to do in this case as well: Protect the whistleblower.”
Doing that wasn’t easy. The complaint had been filed under a 1998 law that Pelosi had helped craft during her time on the Intelligence Committee. That legislation, for the first time, set up a legal mechanism for filing a complaint without risking prosecution for leaking classified information. But in 1998, lawmakers couldn’t anticipate a world with the reach and anonymity of social media. Whistleblowers knew they were a single tweet away from the public spotlight’s harsh glare.
In the Washington Post newsroom, the whistleblower’s identity presented a different dilemma. Even though the paper did not intend to publish the whistleblower’s name, reporters were still interested in finding out as much as they could about the whistleblower’s circumstances and intentions in filing the complaint back in August. Now that the complaint had been released, the contents were no longer a mystery. But important questions remained: Did the whistleblower have direct access to documents? Who had talked to the whistleblower? White House insiders? If so, why? Were there more to come?
As Post reporters knew all too well from the newspaper’s own history, Washington loves a good mystery. During the Watergate investigation that led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974, there was “Deep Throat,” Post reporter Bob Woodward’s secret source. Speculation had swirled for decades around Deep Throat’s identity before it was finally revealed as former FBI official Mark Felt.
As the rest of the media was absorbing the Los Angeles Times story about the audio recording, a New York Times report added to the frenzy of the day, describing the whistleblower as a “CIA officer.” This was the first such public identification. The story reported that the officer, “through an anonymous process,” had first provided information to the CIA’s top lawyer, Courtney Simmons Elwood. She had “shared” the officer’s concerns with White House officials, “following policy.”
The story quoted Bakaj, the whistleblower’s lead counsel, as warning the paper not to reveal those details and others. He called the decision to publish “deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm’s way.” The whistleblower, Bakaj told the Times, “has a right to anonymity.”
Within an hour, a furious debate was raging on social media. The paper had not named the whistleblower, but had it gone too far by publishing identifying details? Was the paper “doing its job” or “doing Trump’s dirty work”? Had it stayed on the right side of a fuzzy ethical line, or smashed through it?
The debate brought a swift explanation from Dean Baquet, the New York Times executive editor. He said: “We decided to publish limited information about the whistleblower—including the fact that he works for a nonpolitical agency and that his complaint is based on an intimate knowledge and understanding of the White House—because we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own judgments about whether or not he is credible. We also understand that the White House already knew he was a CIA officer.”
At the White House, officials insisted publicly that there was no “leak hunt” for the whistleblower. Trump was saying, in exchanges with reporters and in his tweets, that he did not know the person’s identity. But his aides knew how the president felt about leaks and leakers. Trump was obsessed with them, and often had gone to extraordinary lengths to find out the source of a story he considered unflattering. Now Trump’s “spies and treason” talk in New York made plain that the president was in his usual mode, fighting back harder than he was being hit.
One of his biggest supporters, radio talk show host Mark Levin, had a message for the whistleblower’s attorney, who had said his client had a “right to anonymity.” Levin told Sean Hannity on Fox: “Too bad, pal. Too late. You want to impeach our president, using this BS? We want to know all about your guy.”
As evening arrived, Pelosi and her two top lieutenants—Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn—met with the “front-liners,” the party’s nickname for 42 House members facing tough reelection battles, many of them moderate freshmen who had won their seats in pro-Trump territory.
Nearly all the front-liners were now converts to the impeachment movement. But crammed into a small meeting room in the Capitol basement, they pressed two demands. They wanted a focused, efficient and fast inquiry, and they wanted Schiff to lead it. His “parody” hadn’t hurt his standing among his colleagues. It might not have been his most shining moment, but at worst, it was a misdemeanor that the Republicans were trying to blow up into a capital offense.
The moderates had come to trust Schiff as an unflappable and reliable leader. They liked his background as a prosecutor. Impeachment was traditionally the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, but the moderates felt that Nadler was overzealous. If impeachment had to be bipartisan and fair to be effective, Schiff seemed like a much better way to go.
For months, Pelosi’s balancing act had been to impeach or not to impeach. Now it was a different calculus. How wide a net to cast? Nadler’s committee was dominated by Democrats who wanted the inquiry to be as broad as possible, bringing in charges arising from the Mueller report and beyond.
The front-liners argued to Pelosi that they needed to stay tightly focused on Ukraine. The abuse was clear, they said. It would be easier to explain to the public, and it was something that some moderate Republicans might also find impeachable.
Pelosi had no trouble agreeing with them. They had found plenty of common ground.
In choosing Schiff to lead the inquiry, Pelosi was picking someone who was already a villain to Republicans. Schiff had become one of their favorite targets back in the spring, when he was preparing for the release of the Mueller report, making comments about what he and his committee were finding in their parallel investigation.
On Thursday, March 28, Trump took the stage in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a campaign rally, where he unleashed a new schoolyard nickname: “little pencil-neck Adam Schiff.” Trump had already derided Schiff as “sleazy,” and “Adam Schitt.” Then he thought up “pencil neck,” which he tried out at a White House meeting with House Republicans before using it at the rally.
“He’s got the smallest, thinnest neck I’ve ever seen,” Trump said at the rally. “He is not a long-ball hitter.” The next day, the Trump campaign rolled out a T-shirt with an image of Schiff with a pencil for a neck and a red ball on his nose.
The attacks mounted. McCarthy compared Schiff to Communist scaremonger Joseph McCarthy. The nine GOP members of the Intelligence panel signed a letter demanding that Schiff step down as chairman, questioning whether he was abusing his position and damaging the panel’s integrity. Trump himself called for Schiff to resign his House seat, accusing him of “knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking.”
Schiff was amused by some of Trump’s name-calling. He recalled walking through Manhattan with his college-age daughter and people kept recognizing him. Near one restaurant with outdoor seating, a man asked Schiff’s daughter to hold his beer while he took a photo with Schiff.
“What am I now, Dad, the beer holder?” his daughter joked as they walked away. Schiff said he was surprised anyone recognized him, a Washington pol from California, that he was now a semi-celebrity in New York City.
“Well you know, Dad, it’s the pencil neck,” his daughter said.
The assault on Schiff seemed to strengthen his standing within his own caucus and especially with Pelosi. She called the Republicans “scaredy-cats” for attacking Schiff. “What is the president afraid of? Is he afraid of the truth, that he would go after a member… a respected chairman of a committee in the Congress?” she had said at the time. “They just don’t know what to do, so they have to make an attack.”
Now, as she was settling on her strategy and tactics for the impeachment inquiry, she was choosing an ally who seemed fully prepared for what would surely come his way.
The furor arrived before 9 a.m. the next morning.
“Rep. Adam Schiff fraudulently read to Congress, with millions of people watching, a version of my conversation with the President of Ukraine that doesn’t exist,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “He completely changed the words to make it sound horrible, and me sound guilty. HE WAS DESPERATE AND HE GOT CAUGHT. Adam Schiff therefore lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public. He has been doing this for two years. I am calling for him to immediately resign from Congress based on this fraud!”
Schiff replied online less than half an hour later. “You engaged in a shakedown to get election dirt from a foreign country,” he wrote. “And then you tried to cover it up. But you’re right about one thing—your words need no mockery. Your own words and deeds mock themselves. But most importantly here, they endanger our country.”
Elsewhere online, the campaign to flush out the whistleblower had gone to a new level. Two pro-Trump political activists were offering a $50,000 reward to anyone who could come up with the identity. Decrying the entire episode as a “national disgrace,” they said they hoped their reward would succeed in naming the whistleblower and help put “this dark chapter behind us.”
National disgrace or not, the impeachment inquiry and the whistleblower complaint were emerging as an impressive boon to the Trump campaign’s coffers. Presidential son Eric Trump wrote on Twitter that the campaign had raised $8.5 million from small-dollar donors in two days, on top of the big-ticket donations from the VIP fundraiser in Manhattan the night before. “A BIG thank you to @SpeakerPelosi and the Democrats,” he said. “People are sick of your nonsense but please keep it up—you are handing @realDonaldTrump the win in 2020!”
In the battle for the best messaging, it looked like the Republicans were out ahead, once again. Pelosi and Schiff knew the Democrats needed to do better. The hearings would be starting soon, with witnesses in closed-door depositions.