Around two o’clock in the afternoon last Tuesday, Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican, appeared at the entrance to the anteroom outside the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, where the House’s Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight committees have been jointly conducting depositions for the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump. Located on the service level of the Capitol Visitor Center, three floors underground, the SCIF is a collection of offices and conference rooms cloaked in a double layer of metal sheathing to prevent eavesdropping. The lights inside are kept low, there are no windows, and cell phones and other unsecured electronic devices are forbidden. (Aides who want to communicate with members inside have to call and ask a committee staffer to pass along a message in person.) That morning, around seventy-five House members, from both parties, had visited a relatively small conference room inside for the deposition of William B. Taylor, Jr., the chargé d’affaires to Ukraine.
Gaetz was not a member of the three inquiry committees, but since early on in the proceedings he had been trying to gain access to the depositions. Earlier that day, Trump, who has been frustrated with the progress of the inquiry—particularly with his inability to stop members of his own Administration from testifying before House investigators—had reportedly told some of Gaetz’s colleagues that it was time to “take the gloves off.” Although Gaetz was not at the meeting, he has long been one of the President’s most loyal street fighters. After passing through two heavy wooden doors, with matching red signs that read “Restricted Area,” he tried once more to enter the SCIF, and was stopped, as he had been before, by a Capitol Police officer.
A few minutes later, half a dozen journalists, who were staking out the SCIF, scrambled to follow Gaetz as he left the service level, going up a broad spiral staircase. When they trickled back down to what one grizzled cameraman had nicknamed “the pit of despair,” they compared notes: “Did he say, ‘They keep kicking me out’ or ‘They keep throwing me out’?” It wasn’t long before one of Gaetz’s aides came down to the stairwell with flyers announcing that a “press conference demanding transparency in impeachment inquiry” would take place the next morning. Forty House Republicans planned to attend, the flyers said, including Steve Scalise, the Minority Whip; Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee; and Steve King, the Iowa representative who was stripped of his committee assignments by Republican leaders in January, after he wondered aloud why “white supremacist” was an offensive term.
Meanwhile, during a break in Taylor’s testimony, a Capitol maintenance worker attempted to deliver a wheeled lectern to the unsecured anteroom behind the heavy doors. A Capitol Police officer asked what it was for. (Members of the media are not allowed behind the red signs.) According to Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who sits on the Intelligence Committee, the maintenance worker flipped through his paperwork and said, “I got a Congressman Gaetz says he needs it in the morning.”
Swalwell told me about the lectern on Tuesday evening, just as Taylor’s testimony was entering its ninth hour. I asked if he had any idea what Gaetz had planned. He laughed and said, “I half expect tomorrow he’s going to try and stuff himself in his suitcase and have Mark Meadows carry him in.”
The next morning, just as Laura Cooper, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, was preparing to testify to the inquiry against her superiors’ orders, Gaetz returned to the service-level stairwell with more than two dozen of his Republican colleagues. His face was lit with a broad conspiratorial smile. A crowd of press, easily three times the size of the regular stakeout crew, was waiting for them—as was a wheeled lectern. Gaetz spoke first, complaining about “secret interviews, selective leaks, and weird theatrical performances of transcripts that never happened.” After some of his colleagues delivered brief harangues about the unfairness of the impeachment inquiry—“PLEASE LIMIT REMARKS TO 1 MINUTE” a sign taped on the face of the lectern implored—Gaetz returned to the microphone. With the blithe insouciance of an expert party crasher, he said, “We’re gonna go and see if we can get inside.” He disappeared with his Republican colleagues behind the heavy doors, and for a few moments it was just possible to hear them chanting, “Let us in! Let us in!”
It was lost on no one that the assault on the SCIF came a day after what by many accounts had been one of the most damaging witness testimonies against Trump so far. Taylor had largely corroborated a whistle-blower complaint from August that accused the President of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” In his opening statement, Taylor provided the impeachment investigators with a detailed time line of what looked very much like a quid pro quo. Taylor said that he had learned, via Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the E.U., and others, that Trump was personally threatening to withhold a face-to-face meeting with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, along with three hundred and ninety million dollars in military aid, until Zelensky agreed to investigate an unfounded conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, as well as a second unfounded (and until then unrelated) conspiracy theory that Joe Biden, while Vice-President, had helped his son Hunter by forcing the government to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor.
A few hours into the sit-in, the Republicans ordered Chick-fil-A and pizza. The incursion necessitated an electronic sweep by the Sergeant at Arms to re-secure the SCIF, and delayed Cooper’s testimony by five hours. According to Val Demings, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee from Florida and a former police chief, the Republicans who came into the conference room started yelling at Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, about the need for transparency. “I felt, O.K., here we go,” Demings said. “Because I’ve been in the presence of gang members and mobs before.” Demings and other members of the Intelligence Committee said that they were particularly saddened that the interruption took place in the SCIF. “It’s not a sacred space, but it’s danggone sure pretty important,” Demings said. “Imagine if there was a group of people who thought someone on trial was being unjustly or unfairly treated, but they decided to just storm the courtroom, overthrow the bench, run the judge out of town, and say, ‘Nope, he hasn’t been treated fairly, so we’re not gonna let this trial go forward.’ ”
Sean Maloney, a Democratic congressman from upstate New York who sits on the Intelligence Committee, said that the SCIF is “one of the few areas here where there are adults who act like adults doing serious work.” He noted, with obvious pride, that none of the Republicans yelling inside the SCIF were members of the Intelligence Committee. “We share a common perspective on a lot of national-security issues, even if we strongly disagree on some other things,” Maloney said, of his Republican colleagues. What happened on Wednesday was “not purely a red-team-versus-blue-team thing,” he told me. “I think what you saw in that room was a clash between the culture of bipartisanship and serious professionalism that defines the Intelligence Committee space with the tabloid, circus-like atmosphere of the Trump era.” Maloney said that he saw Mike Conaway, a Republican on the Intelligence Committee, collecting iPads, Fitbits, phones, and smart watches after he realized that the intruders had not left their devices in the anteroom. Gaetz’s stunt, Maloney added, signified how far the investigation has come in a short period. “It was almost like they had decided that there was just too much truth getting out and they had to do something,” Maloney said. “So they broke the glass, slammed down on the red button, and decided to act like children in there.”
Until Wednesday, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the three committees, there had been a sense of serious purpose to the over-all impeachment inquiry. On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that some Republicans have used their time in the depositions “to try to link those [witnesses] appearing as part of the impeachment inquiry to other individuals who figured prominently in GOP efforts to discredit previous investigations of Trump’s ties with Russia in 2016,” a claim that I heard from some Democrats as well. “They’ll make their points up front, for the record, about why they think the impeachment inquiry is one thing or another,” Maloney told me. But he also said that, at the start of each deposition, the Republican staff counsel “spends an hour asking serious questions. Their members then take turns asking questions. There’s no arguing, there’s no raised voices, there’s no theatrics. It’s a very professional process, and they have conducted themselves in a way that none of us have objected to.”
Francis Rooney, a Republican of Florida who serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee, echoed Maloney’s account. “There’s an occasional demagogue guy on either side, but, by and large, it’s been very civil,” he said. Rooney praised the patient approach and calm demeanor of Schiff, who’s been leading the inquiry day to day for the three House committees, and Daniel Goldman, the Intelligence Committee’s director of investigations. “There hasn’t been any attempt to stop people from asking questions. That’s why they’re taking so long. So I don’t feel that it’s been an unfair process.”
Rooney, a former Ambassador to the Holy See, is the only current House Republican to show unambiguous public sympathy for the impeachment inquiry. When I visited him in his office last week, he was wearing pale khaki pants, a white shirt, and leather-laced moccasins. He acknowledged that what appears to have happened in Ukraine was far outside the bounds of acceptable diplomacy. “You’ve got all these people over there conducting diplomacy according to the book, and then you come to find out that your words are being countermanded or ignored because there’s Rudy Giuliani and the three amigos out there going about their business. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Rooney is in many ways a doctrinaire Republican: he voted for Trump’s tax cuts, disapproves of DACA, and opposes abortion. In 2017, at the peak of the Russia investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, he said that he was “very concerned that the D.O.J. and F.B.I., whether you want to call it ‘deep state’ or what, are kind of off the rails.” But he has also introduced bills that would establish a carbon tax and ban offshore drilling. Rooney has a large photo of the burning Deepwater Horizon oil rig propped against a wall in his office. “I keep that there for when the industry guys drop in,” he said.
Rooney’s district, on the west coast of Florida, went for Trump by twenty-two points in 2016. He said that many of his constituents “really would be for him if he walked down Fifth Avenue and shot somebody. So they’re pretty upset. A lot of them are saying, ‘I don’t care what he does. You should be for him.’ I tell them, ‘No, that’s not going to happen with me.’ I haven’t heard anything yet that would make me vote to impeach him, but I owe it to myself and to the oath of office and to the job to get facts.”
According to Democratic aides close to the inquiry, the first hint that something was amiss in Ukraine came in April, months before the whistle-blower’s report, when the Ukrainian prosecutor-general began publicly attacking Marie Yovanovitch, who was the American Ambassador at the time. In June, after Giuliani admitted to the Times that he and his associates were “not meddling in an election” with their work in Ukraine but rather “meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” the staffs of the three House committees that are now conducting the inquiry first started working together. (When the Daily Beast reported on the potential for a congressional investigation, Giuliani responded, “Do it! Give me a chance to give a couple speeches about it and hold a press conference. I’d love that. . . . I think it’d be a fun fight.”) The committees’ concerns were heightened in May, when Yovanovitch was unexpectedly recalled from her post, and again in July, when the committees learned that the congressionally approved security assistance had not been delivered.
On September 9th, the first working day in Congress after the end of the August recess, the three inquiry committees sent a joint letter demanding documents from the State Department about the July 25th call between Trump and Zelensky. The same day, during a closed-door meeting of the Intelligence Committee, Schiff said that the intelligence community’s inspector general had told him that an urgent whistle-blower complaint was being withheld by the acting director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire. Ten days later, the I.C.I.G. briefed Schiff’s committee behind closed doors. He wouldn’t talk about the substance of the complaint, but, Swalwell said, “He told us the White House, the Department of Justice, and the acting D.N.I. were involved in blocking him, so we knew it was something earth-shattering.” On September 24th, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced the start of a formal impeachment inquiry; the Times reported on Monday that Democrats will hold a floor vote on October 31st to “affirm” the inquiry’s procedures.
When I asked Rooney, who recently announced that he would retire after this term, for his thoughts on the progress of the inquiry so far, he said that impeachment “would probably be the most serious decision that anybody serving right now would ever make.” He told a story about his father, a construction magnate, whose company Rooney inherited. (In a strange coincidence, Rooney’s family business built the Capitol Visitor Center, including the SCIF.) Rooney recalls his father, a staunch conservative, saying that Watergate was “just a witch hunt on Nixon. The liberal establishment, the whole bit.” The day after the Saturday Night Massacre, Rooney said, his father had attended church at Holy Trinity, in Georgetown. The priest asked for a moment of silence for the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, and the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson. “My dad and all these business guys, they all got up and walked out, right in the middle of church. That’s how intense it was. Just like it’s intense now. But it turned out, come that following July, they all realized they’d been had. And so I thought, well, I’m not going to get had.”
If the subject matter of the impeachment inquiry depends on what has happened in the White House, the State Department, and wherever Giuliani happened to be at any given moment, the politics of the investigation owes much to the hard lessons that many Democrats feel they took away from the Mueller investigation. Swalwell, for example, was hardly alone in believing that the Mueller report revealed impeachable conduct on the part of the President. And yet, however damning Mueller’s conclusions may have been in substance, they were couched in a dense and complicated narrative that made it difficult to motivate the political will to address them. The report, Swalwell said, was too “overwhelming” for anyone who wasn’t following the Russia story closely. “You needed, like, a Ph.D. in Russian studies to understand it.”
The simplicity of the Ukraine story helped Democrats escape what Swalwell called the post-Mueller “impeachment purgatory.” “It’s so easy to understand,” he said. “Most people know what a shakedown is. This just happens to be three hundred and ninety million dollars that was leveraged.”
Many of the House Democrats whom I spoke to seem aware that they’ve been given a rare second chance, although none of them said so explicitly. A staffer working on the inquiry told me that, after the Mueller report was released, Democrats “spent six to eight weeks mired in a circular-firing-squad conversation with ourselves. Like, do we impeach? Do we not impeach? Is it obstruction? Is it not obstruction? It just became less about the substance and more about the process.” This time around, the Democrats involved in the investigation are particularly keen to avoid the sort of legal trench warfare that characterized their previous dealings with the Administration. If Trump threatens people and intimidates witnesses, Swalwell told me, the investigators will treat that as consciousness of guilt. If witnesses refuse to testify, the committees are not going to let themselves get mired in an ever-escalating series of court cases. “We’re just going to assume that it’s because showing up doesn’t help you, and you’re guilty,” Swalwell said. “We’re going to move on.” What’s more, while the investigation so far has raised serious questions about the involvement of the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo; the Attorney General, William Barr; and even Vice-President Mike Pence in the Ukraine scheme, Democrats said that they plan to stay laser-focussed on Trump. “Don’t go down these crazy rabbit holes about Giuliani and his goons, and who’s paying Giuliani,” one of the aides close to the inquiry told me. “Giuliani’s working at the behest of the President. He’s the President’s henchman. It all is a top-down scheme.”
House Democrats have multiple active investigations into Trump’s finances, and they are still pursuing information from the Mueller investigation. (On Friday, a district-court judge in Washington ruled that the Department of Justice must hand over information from Mueller’s grand jury to the House Democrats.) And in July the Ways and Means Committee received its own whistle-blower complaint, which reportedly details an attempt by a Treasury Department political appointee to interfere with an audit of the President or Vice-President’s tax returns. Democrats in the House insist that there has been no decision—or even a time line for a decision—about whether any of these investigations, including the one about Ukraine, will result in articles of impeachment.
At least some of this delay appears to be tactical. One congressperson told me that moderate freshmen in the caucus have been saying, “We want you guys to really emphasize that it’s a fair hearing, and that we’re being deliberative, and we haven’t made up our minds yet.” Meanwhile, one of the aides close to the inquiry said that the most hesitant Democrats have asked that discussions about impeachment be handled with an appropriately solemn tone, and for the time and latitude to help their constituents come to terms with the potential reality of what would be only the third Presidential-impeachment vote in the nation’s history.
One of the odder things about the impeachment inquiry so far is that the most damning evidence against the President was revealed by the President, and not by the congressional investigators working three floors below the Capitol. Democrats recognize that Trump’s brazenness presents its own sort of challenge. Swalwell told me that when he was a prosecutor he used to have two kinds of murder trials. “There’s a ‘what is it’ and a whodunnit. A whodunnit is where the defendant is saying, ‘I didn’t do it.’ A ‘what is it’ is where the defendant says, ‘Yeah, I did it, but that is not a crime.’ I think that’s what we have here. He’s acknowledging the conduct, just doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it.” As Swalwell put it in another conversation, “We have this bombshell confession, so we don’t want the public to be thinking there’s something coming when it’s actually already here.”
In purely political terms, these are good problems to have. Inside the SCIF on Tuesday, according to Rooney, at least a few of his Republican colleagues appeared “visibly concerned” by Taylor’s testimony. Tom Malinowski, a freshman Democrat who serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee, noticed this, too. He said that some Republicans “are serving as the President’s lawyers, which is fine. That’s a feature of our adversarial system.” Others, however, “are there to actually try to make up their minds. You can tell that they’re troubled.” A month ago, Malinowski told me, he would have said that it was impossible to expect any Republican in the House to vote for articles of impeachment. Now he’s not so sure.
Like many Republicans who were not on the inquiry committees, Kevin Hern, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma who participated in the storming of the SCIF, wants to see the evidence for himself. He allowed that the Democrats’ story about what Trump had done sounded bad. “If I look at what the Democrats say, yeah, I have a problem with that,” he told me. But he also said, not unreasonably, that he didn’t trust the accuracy of that narrative. “You can put a spin on anything,” he said. When I asked Hern what would count for him as impeachable conduct, he said, “Obviously, any kind of quid pro quo, where there’s something that’s, you know, was this call bribery?”
Republicans who have been allowed inside the SCIF, meanwhile, had their own complaints about the process. On Wednesday afternoon, while the SCIF was still occupied, Mark Meadows, who sits on the oversight committee, gamely defended his colleagues’ demands. “There’s a number of members who believe that this is going to be one of the most important votes they take,” he said. “And there’s a number of congressional members that are not part of the three committees that plan to stay there until we have a more open and transparent fair process.” Meadows said that Democrats “have complete access and control of the depositions,” while he couldn’t review the transcripts “without having a Democrat staffer monitoring me.” Meadows also argued that there has been a lack of witnesses with firsthand knowledge, and suggested that the question of when the Ukrainians knew about the withholding of security assistance was somehow crucial to determining whether there was a quid pro quo. But he was perhaps unintentionally forthcoming about the way things were going for Trump when he said that, “to date, we’ve had six witnesses, and all six witnesses have been the star witnesses for the Democrats.”
Democrats, for their part, are quick to wave away the complaints about process. For one thing, they argue that the rules for the closed-door depositions are the same as they were for the Benghazi hearings, when Republicans were in the majority. For another, they say that few Republicans have taken advantage of the access to the depositions they do have. “In case we forget, there’s forty-eight members of the Republican Party who have every right to be in that room, including Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Lee Zeldin, Scott Perry, and a bunch of others who are some of the President’s most ardent defenders,” Maloney said. “These guys tend to come and go, and very few of them will be there for any meaningful length of time. They love to make a big stink about it, but they actually have access to their room, and almost none of them have chosen to take advantage of it.” (On Wednesday evening, after Gaetz’s stunt, Swalwell told me, “Half of me thinks, knowing these guys, that if we had just proceeded with all of them in there they would have left fifteen minutes later, because none of them want to stick around and listen to what’s going on, anyway.”)
Democrats insist that the secrecy is temporary, and will last only as long as it takes to get witnesses on the record, under oath, so that they can’t coördinate their stories or change them later. Most of the members of the inquiry whom I spoke to were reluctant to say when open proceedings would begin, but, Maloney told me, “We’re talking about a couple of weeks here when all of this will be laid before the country. I’ve got to tell you that the Republicans should be careful what they wish for.” He predicted that “when the transcripts get released, which is going to happen soon, and when the witnesses come before us in open session and repeat all this important information, these Republicans are going to long for the day when it was behind closed doors.”
