House passes resolution formalizing impeachment process

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House passes resolution formalizing impeachment process

White House objects citing no due process; reaction and analysis from the 'Special Report' all-star panel.

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," October 31, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: The Democrats are desperate. They're desperate. They have nothing. They've got nothing going.

REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., HOUSE SPEAKER: This is a sad day. It's a sad day because nobody comes to Congress to impeach a president of the United States, no one.

REP. STEVE SCALISE, R-LA, HOUSE MINORITY WHIP: Pelosi is infatuated with impeachment. We deserve better.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF, D-CALIF.: I rise in strong support, but I do not take any pleasure in the events that have made this process necessary.

REP. DOUG COLLINS, R-GA: This is a dark day and a cloud has fallen on this House. It has been falling for 10 months, and it is showing itself today.

PELOSI: The resolution is adopted without objection. The motion to reconsider is laid upon the table.

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BRET BAIER, HOST: It's a formal process now, resolution passing of the House today. The vote was 232 to 196. No Republicans voted for this resolution, two Democratic votes -- no votes, Representatives Jeff Van Drew and Collin Peterson, New Jersey and Minnesota. Representative Justin Amash, Independent from Michigan, voted yes for this.

Let's bring in our panel and see where we go from here, Ben Domenech, publisher of "The Federalist," Mara Liasson, national political correspondent for National Public Radio, and Byron York, chief political correspondent for the "Washington Examiner."

Mara, first to you. This sets the table for the next steps, public hearings to calm. Your thoughts on this day and what it means big picture?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: This is a lot of what the Republicans have said that they wanted the Democrats to do. Public hearings, transcripts available, some kind of due process for the president. His lawyers will get to cross examine some witnesses. But the most important thing about this is that this formalizes the process, and that gives Democrats a slightly stronger hand when they go to court to try and compel or enforce the subpoenas that they have issued. Once they've formalized it, it gives them a little bit stronger hand.

BAIER: Congressman Collins, Ben, earlier in the show said this does not change their complaints about this process. It doesn't, they believe, give a fair take because of all the guidelines that are set up and the minutia of the resolution.

BEN DOMENECH, "THE FEDERALIST": I think Congressman Collins speaks for a lot of his Republican colleagues when he says that. The fact is this isn't really going to really change anything about the approach that the Republicans have had. They reject this process as being something that is unacceptable from the get-go, that is baseless in terms of its approach, and I don't think that they're going to change their tune at all.

What I do think we're going to see more of is demands for transparency, demands for releasing the depositions that have already been done so that all of this can get out in the public and people can judge for themselves.

BAIER: Byron, you just say down, or talked with President Trump, some on, some off the record. Your sense of his feelings on this day and his tone going forward?

BRYON YORK, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, "WASHINGTON EXAMINER": Obviously, he's not happy with this vote. No president would be happy with this vote. But the thing that you get after talking to him is how strongly he stresses that he believes he did nothing wrong on this phone call with the president of Ukraine. He says, look, I'm on this phone call, I know there's 15 to 20 people listening. I don't know who all these people are, and I'm going to commit a crime on this phone call with all these people listening?

And I think what we saw this morning, he tweeted out a three-word tweet, which was, "Read the transcript." He absolutely believes that it exonerates him. And of course, this is what Democrats say is the smoking gun against him. So that is just where we are right now.

BAIER: Here's the House Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff talking about the procedure going forward.

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REP. ADAM SCHIFF, D-CALIF.: During the depositions that we have conducted thus far, we have used a format that we believe very conducive to the fact-finding process. Those procedures now will be incorporated into the open hearings in which staff counsel will be permitted for lengthy periods of time to do sustained questioning for up to 45 minutes per side, followed by member questioning.

REP. ANDY BIGGS, R-ARIZ.: He has had three days of closed-door hearings. He has got a whole bunch of closed-door hearings next week. Nothing has really changed about the way this is going to go forward. They have already predetermined their outcome.

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BAIER: Mara, there's some talk, to go back to Byron's point about the transcript, there's some talk from different witnesses that there may be parts of this that words are left out, and the implication is there is more to the phone call that we have seen in this transcript. But we don't know all about that because we haven't seen the back and forth with cross examination of some of these witnesses beyond the opening statements.

LIASSON: Right. What we know is what has been reported, that Alexander Vindman said that there were some words left out. The word "Burisma" wasn't included in that memo that was released, the rough transcript of the conversation. But we are not hearing that the things that were left out changed the meeting or were any kind of a bombshell.

But I do think that one thing the Democrats have done that is smart is they are going to have staff lawyers do the questioning. They already have been having them doing it behind closed doors, and when these hearings become public, they're not going to have this grandstanding, each member kind of burning up minutes. You're going to have a trained staff lawyer doing the depositions. And the Republicans will have the opportunity.

BAIER: Ben, is your sense that the Democrats are really trying to be laser-focused here? It seemed like the Russia investigation and the public hearings really fell flat and were kind of all over the place. They're trying to be more focused here to be able to make their case to the American people?

DOMENECH: I think they learned from the mistakes that they made during that process, that everything really went all in different directions, to Mara's point, a lot of different grandstanding going on that you could see from a lot of members. They want to keep this as laser-focused as possible.

But I still think this is going to be a situation that is really challenging for them when it comes to the timing. We're going to see this continue to slip, and it's going to go into next year in all likelihood, into an election year, and you are going to have a trial play out the Senate in ways that could be very politically unpredictable.

BAIER: Which brings me to the next topic in the next panel, start with you, Byron. Next up, the potential impact of impeachment on the 2020 election.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Who is the fight going to be against in November, 2020? Who is going to come take you on?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: Elizabeth Warren is picking up steam. It could her. It could be Bernie Sanders, I guess, maybe. I don't know. Bernie looks like he's shot.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: But you've said many times you consider yourself a top tier candidate.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS, D-CALIF., PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I still do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What if he were your nominee for president and it's him versus Donald Trump, who do you vote for?

SEN. JOE MANCHIN, D-W.V.: Well, it wouldn't be Bernie.

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BAIER: Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia getting some pushback from Senator Sanders on that answer there. This as the impact of the impeachment inquiry and what could be articles of impeachment on the 2020 race factors in, the latest battleground state poll asking the question about impeachment and removal from office breaks down by state. And as you take a look at it, support/oppose, it's underwater as far as impeachment and removal from office in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

We're back with the panel. Byron, as the president reflects on this day, this inquiry going forward, any sense of how he looks towards 2020?

YORK: This is an astonishingly political situation. We haven't had something like this happen. In 1868, which was what Andrew Johnson was impeached, it was an insanely political act. It was an election year, but Johnson's hopes were dashed very quickly. But the other two, Nixon and Clinton, the other two impeachments, both of them occurred after the president had bad reelected. We have not in the modern era had a time like this in which we are in the middle of a presidential campaign and the opposition party is trying to impeach the president who is running for reelection.

And it's pretty clear that a number of Democrats and their supporters believe that if they do this right, they will damage the president in his reelection bid. That is a political motive, and if you look at the Clinton impeachment, the most effective argument the president had at that time was saying that his impeachers were politically motivated. But we are going to see that thrown around a lot in the next few months.

BAIER: We don't know, Mara, the evidence that we don't know, but it's hard to believe that 20 Republicans in the Senate will vote to convict, which means that their removal opportunity is the election of 2020.

LIASSON: Removal is the really key thing here. I think that because we are an election year, every Republican in the Senate has a safe place to land. They can say, if they want, I thought what the president said on the call was inappropriate, or I wouldn't have done it, but I want my voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, to decide for themselves if the president should be removed from office, because that's the most sacred act in our democracy.

And I think that's a very safe place for Republicans to land. I would be surveillance if we see any Republicans breaking ranks. They can still criticize the president if they feel that what he did wasn't what they would have done. But the argument to leave this to the voters when we are less than a year away is pretty strong.

BAIER: Ben, Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, also in the administration, does often weigh in on these controversial days and issues, but today on the impeachment inquiry day, she tweeted out this, quoting Thomas Jefferson, "surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word that falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them." Thomas Jefferson's reflections on Washington, D.C., in a letter to his daughter Martha. Some things never change, dad!"

DOMENECH: As the publisher of "The Federalist" I am always a fan of people quoting the founders, though Thomas Jefferson was not someone who got along very well with those who drafted "The Federalist," particularly Alexander Hamilton.

I think that in this context, to Byron and Mara's point, there is a safe place for Republican senators to land, which is not something that you necessarily see in prior impeachment engagements. This is one that's really fraught with peril. You have one of the smartest political operators alive, maybe the smartest Democrat not named Bill Clinton in Nancy Pelosi, as a reluctant participant in this process all along, being dragged to the point where she felt that she needed to come forward and do this because of what her conference wanted, not necessarily because of what she thought was the wise, political decision.

You saw those comments from Joe Manchin earlier about Bernie Sanders. We also saw the unwillingness of someone like Senator Kyrsten Sinema from the state of Arizona to come and say that she would automatically support the nominee of her party in the 2020 context. There is a lot of concern among Democrats in swing, purple states about what this is going to do to their prospects.

BAIER: Byron, one word to describe the president going forward? Is it "undeterred" after sitting with him?

YORK: "Undeterred" would be a good word, and "confident" would be another word.

BAIER: Thank you, panel. When we come back, finishing the fight.

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BAIER: Finally tonight, we showed you live them coming back to D.C., but celebrating the Washington Nationals first World Series win.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations, Nats. We love you.

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BAIER: Bipartisan support in Washington. Meantime, Daniel Krauthammer, our friend, shared about the bittersweet moment in a tweet, quote, "World Series champs, I am so happy for the Nationals, my fellow fans, and dear friends, the Lerner family. But there is a hole in my heart that my father is not here to see it. I wish I could share this with him. I know he would be the most joyful of all." So very true. Congrats to the Nationals.

Thanks for inviting us into your home tonight. That's it for the “Special Report.” Fair, balanced, and unafraid. "The Story", hosted by Martha MacCallum, starts right now.

Hi, Martha.

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