Trump Demands To Meet Anonymous Whistle-blower

and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. As President Trump is demanding to meet the anonymous whistle blower who complained about Trump's request that Ukraine investigate his political opponent, how Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling on the White House to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, and at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin Saturday, Pelosi said that she decided to launch the inquiry into the president's call with Ukraine based on the facts. People say, you have taken political risk

doing that. That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter because we cannot have a president of the United States undermining his oath of office. Joining me A Brad Moss, a partner with the law firm Mark Z. The firm represents the whistle blower, but Brad has been walled off from that matter. So Brad, President Trump has demanded to meet the whistle blower and provide and the people who provided him information. Is it possible to complete an impeachment inquiry without exposing

the identity of the whistle blower? Of course, And the president here is confusing what would happen in a criminal proceeding which he has been immunized from by virtue of a d o J opinion that says a sitting president camp be indicted from what happens in the impeachment process. There is no sixth Amendment right to confront your user

in the impeachment process. And this is very much, you know, it's a standard for Donald Trump, who you know, likes to view himself as a street fighter and a counterpuncher. He wants to try to intimidate the individuals the side of the individual who came forward this particular whistle blower.

He also wants to intimidate whoever provided information to the whistleblower, something that would be a gross abuse of his authority and power, because ultimately those individuals work for the executive branch, and he's the head of the executive branch. The president is going to have to learn the going to have to deal with the fact that by virtue of being president, it doesn't make him into an autocrat. He has to still comply with certain rules, and he's gonna be dealing

with a separate branch of government, namely Congress. Members of the Intelligence Committee and to other committees have scheduled uh potentially pivotal closed or interviews this week with past and present administration officials. If part of the impeachment inquiry for Democrats is to convince Americans, shouldn't they be holding all these hearings in public? So it depends on certain circumstances.

There are There is context in which I can imagine some of this can't be done in public, if for no other reason than there are interests of national security. They have to be protected that the members theeople who will vote on impeachment need to know. But that can't be discussed in an open setting where other individuals beyond

the American public would be able to see it. So you think about some of the context of some of these conversations the President had with foreign leaders, efforts to put certain information onto co word classified systems, and the details of how that's done. Those are the kind of things that ordinarily you can't get out of a govern agency if you were to say, sue for that information

on the Freedom Information Act. You can see why the ANCIS would have problems disclosing that in an open congressional hearing. I don't anticipate that to be the rule. I expect that to be the exception in these in peace proceedings. But there is some some context, some detail that might not be allowed to be provided to the public. Now, Nancy Pelosi has said there's a cover up of the

cover up, um. But as far as we've heard, is there any indication that President Trump was involved in that decision to put the transcript of the call, you know, into that secret code word access. So so at the moment, we don't know the honest answers. We don't know what

we don't know. We know that the White House lawyers and then apparently National Security Council officials were so concerned about that call with the Ukrainians, as well as previous calls with other foreign leaders, that they had started making this a practice in terms of putting these transcripts, which are classified but classified at a low level like a secret and putting them in a specialized database that is meant for some of the nation's most sensitive uh national

security secrets. At the Coword Classified level and is largeably an abuse of that particular system and the protections that affords. Whether we're not the President is aware of it, or was part of that discussion or you know, provided even implicit guidance on that remains to be seen. But in the end, he is still the president. They all work for him. He ultimately is responsible for the actions not only of himself, but for those beneath him and what they had to do to try to cover up what

he was doing. Now, the Democrats have said that they're going to try to streamline this impeachment inquiry, They're going to try to move it quickly. They're gonna try to

keep it on on the point. But you have, for example, two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, two senior Republican senators, are asking the Justice Department for information about Joe Biden's interactions with Ukraine officials and whether Ukraine work with Democrats in sixteen to get damaging information on President Trump's election campaign. So how difficult is it going to

be to keep the lines clear for Democrats. We'll sure there's going to be a fair amount of counter political messaging coming from Senate Republicans to say nothing of the White House and its media allies, and you had to expect that. But the Senate has no controls roll over the initial impeachment process. That falls within the exclusive jurisdiction of the House. And so the House is going to

do with thing. They're going to run their hearings and they're going to outline the article's impeachment after that, as the assume me as the set a majority. Leader Mitch McConnell said today, if there are articles impeachment voted on and they're approved from the House, the Senate will take it up. The extent to which Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson try to run counter hearings ultimately will have no impact one way or the other on what articles of

impeachment get voted out of the House. Just a minute here, but Brad mcc Senator McConnell also said that, you know, as you said on CNBC, I have no choice but to take it up. How long you're on it is a whole different matter. Is he signally anything there? Am I reading too much into it? I mean, I think Mitch McConnell is hedging his bets here to trying to see how far things go. I don't think he's going to try to sacrifice his own political career. He you know,

his relections on the line. I think we'll have to wait as present, on which I'm gonna say, we'll wait and see what happens. All right, Thanks so much, Brad. We're gonna be doing a lot of waiting in the next few months. That's Brad Moss. He's a partner at Mark Say. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg