Understanding the Whistle-Blower

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Welcome to Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

It all happened so quickly.

After three years of news about Russia and the Mueller Report, an entirely new scandal made impeachment a sudden reality.

Last Monday, as details of the whistleblower complaint emerged, the Washington Post published an op-ed in which seven Democrats, all with national security backgrounds, came out in favor of impeachment.

The next afternoon, not coincidentally, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Pelosi announced the beginning of the impeachment inquiry.

This week, we're talking with one of those Democrats.

Representative Alyssa Slotkin doesn't have just any national security background.

She's a former CIA analyst who, like the whistleblower, spent time detailed to the White House.

And it just so happens she worked on Ukraine policy when she was at the Pentagon during the Obama presidency.

I want to get her to explain what's going on, what is supposed to happen in these situations, and why it was these actions by the president which took her to yes on an impeachment inquiry.

So after we talk about what she saw that brought her to impeachment, we're going to talk about how the politics have been playing out.

Slotkin represents a very pro-Trump district in Michigan, a state which is going to be at the center of the action for next year's presidential race.

So Congresswoman, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks for having me.

So let's start with this.

You spent time as a CIA analyst detailed to the National Security Council in the White House.

You worked there under Bush and Obama.

So you're one of the few people who've done the kind of work that this whistleblower did.

So can you help us understand what that role is like?

When you read the complaint, did you recognize your own experience in it?

What's it like to do that job?

You are sort of up close and personal watching the president's decision making and watching, you know, calls and events and taking notes and writing talking points.

It's a very all-encompassing experience.

And frankly, when I read the whistleblower's report, I knew almost immediately that it was a CIA officer on detail down to the White House.

What gave it away?

The writing style is exactly how we're trained.

I mean, when you're a young CIA analyst, you go to a training course that everyone goes through and they train you in the specific writing and briefing style of the CIA.

And the minute, I mean, my team handed me a copy and we were walking out of the Capitol and I said, this is a CIA analyst who was on loan.

I had the the experience of covering the Obama White House, so I have some sense of how things worked in another White House.

And someone said to me a couple of days ago,

to really appreciate what's going on with

the procedures that we're seeing were in place here for the Trump White House, you have to have an appreciation of what it was on the inside.

I'm wondering,

when you look at what has come out and you see the way that you guys did business in the Bush White House, in the Obama Obama White House.

How divergent from that is what you're seeing about how the Trump White House did it?

Well, you know, from everything I understand, they just have sort of broken down on process.

Whether I was working for Bush or Obama, there was a certain set of procedures on how something got to the president.

I mean, if you were going to write a memo or a piece of some kind or make a recommendation on a policy to the president, that went through tremendous vetting throughout what's called the interagency, right?

The other departments and agencies would have been able to have their shot at giving their best advice on that policy.

They would be able to contribute to it.

And the people on the national security staff would have whittled it down to something

concrete and vetted.

And that would have gone up through the chain through the National Security Advisor and over to the president.

And,

you know, not everything made it.

If it wasn't ready for prime time, it didn't go.

And I just, from what I understand from people who

were working there and in some cases have colleagues who are still working there, it just, that process has broken down.

And the flow of information in and out of the Oval Office is fundamentally different than in the two presidents that I worked for.

And that's worrisome.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It seems like a lot of this is driven by the worry about leaks and then maybe hiding things because they didn't want them leaked and putting them on this separate system and all that.

In addition to what was part of these conversations, that seems to have been part of the thinking here.

Sure.

And I think leaks happen in every administration.

And they're always

to the utmost frustration of everyone who works at the White House.

No one likes leaks.

Leaks are illegal, especially if you're leaking.

Well, okay, journalists like leaks.

But if you're like me and you're a former CIA analyst and Pentagon assistant secretary and, you know, your husband spent his entire career in the military, leaks, we don't like leaks.

And especially if you share classified information, that's illegal.

And so I understand the impulse, I guess, to protect classified information, but the information we're talking about here is not classified.

The information that captures the phone call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine, where the President, and he's acknowledged this publicly,

asks for dirt on an American citizen, on a political rival.

That is not classified information.

You learn on your first day being a CIA analyst that just because something's sensitive or embarrassing does not mean it's classified.

There's actually specific law around how you classify something.

And, you know, I think that's why you have separate systems.

You have this sort of internal

database of every document that the president

has touched touched or will see or readouts of all the calls.

There's an unclassified system, there's a classified system, and then there's a code word system, which is like the most restricted.

And the movement from unclassified to code word violates the spirit and the law of how we classify things.

So that would have been highly unusual in both the White Houses that I served in.

The president has been pushing to out the whistleblower.

He says he has a right to confront his accuser.

You worked early on in the Director of National Intelligence Office when these whistleblower protections were being established.

What is he getting wrong about the situation here, do you think?

Aaron Powell,

I mean,

the whole thing is if you don't like leaks, right, and you say that leaks are against the law, if they reveal classified information, if you are against leaks, a whistleblower protection allows someone who has concerns to go and turn to someone when they have problems, when they have deep concerns about something that's going on, either related to national security or just waste, fraud, and abuse.

So

the alternative to a leak is the whistleblower protections because it allows someone to come forward.

And I think, I mean, obviously the president...

sort of threatening in a veiled threat, you know, the whistleblower and saying they want to confront that person is exactly why we put these protections in place.

So this very exact thing wouldn't happen, that the commander-in-chief wouldn't be intimidating someone who came forward based on a concern of conscience or concern over a waste, fraud, and abuse.

Aaron Powell,

I think that

you have this career that seems to have sort of primed you for this moment because when you were at the Pentagon, one of the things that you were working on was Ukraine.

And it seems that you were there

during the period in which

Hunter Biden and Joe Joe Biden were both involved and stuff, how much of a mess were things in Ukraine at that point?

I was at the Pentagon and was in a senior position when, in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea.

So under the cover of security for the Sochi Olympics in Russia,

they moved troops, they moved materiel, and they illegally annexed part of Ukraine.

Then they continued on in the eastern side of the country to sponsor

a sort of little green men scenario where folks who were either loyal to the Russians, trained by the Russians, provided money and materiel by the Russians were fomenting an insurgency on the eastern side of Ukraine.

And pretending that they were not part of the Russian army, that was,

we called them little green men because they were denying that they had a connection to Russia, but of course that that's not true.

And people don't realize that 13,000 people have died in that war.

That's a huge cost to a country that's much smaller than ours.

So almost immediately, given that Ukraine is a partner nation, we started talking about providing defensive aid to them, material support to help them defend themselves.

So everything from emergency medical equipment to

radars to

communications equipment, just anything that enables the defense of a country, of a partner country.

There was a vociferous debate about whether to also provide them offensive assistance, right?

Yeah, that went back and forth for a long time.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And

but that is,

this is, you know, for the two years that I was working as a senior position at the Pentagon, 2014 to 2016, we spent a tremendous amount of time.

And in addition to material aid, we actually sent over U.S.

military personnel to train the Ukrainians.

I was a graduation speaker at the first training class graduation where our special forces trained their special forces.

I mean, we have been in it with them in Ukraine since 2014 when, you know, Russia came to annex part of their country.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: It makes me think that part of the issue here with what happened is that the president held up military aid to Ukraine for a couple of weeks and it seems like was doing that to put some pressure on the Ukrainian government to do what he wanted.

How much of a difference does it make for military aid to be put on hold for a couple of weeks?

What does that do actually on the ground?

Aaron Powell, we are the single biggest donor of military aid to Ukraine.

So

when things don't show up on time, they notice.

And not just the top levels of the government, all the soldiers who are waiting for that equipment, all the Ministry of Defense folks, politically, politically, it's a huge deal when this stuff arrives.

I mean, you should see the kind of press releases and kind of ribbon-cutting-like ceremonies they have had in the past when our aid has arrived.

It's a big deal there, not to mention when our U.S.

military personnel arrive, right?

That is a really big deal.

And people are waving American flags, and it's a real supportive environment there for us.

So when it doesn't arrive on time, everybody notices.

I mean, the Ukrainians are sitting there.

They are not a NATO ally.

They used to be part of the Soviet Union.

They're extremely vulnerable to Russian influence.

A ton of their industry there, their economy was connected to Russia, which of course was severed after they annexed Crimea.

So they're in a very vulnerable situation.

And the signal it sends if that aid is delayed, especially if there's a sense that it's delayed purposefully, is significant.

Aaron Powell,

so can you just then?

There there's so many pieces of this.

When you

started to find out that there was an issue with some reporting that there was a whistleblower complaint about a conversation with a foreign leader, and then it became that we knew that it was with Ukraine,

and then we knew that it was about Joe Biden, and then we found out what was actually part of the call.

When do you become aware that there's an issue?

When do you start getting alarmed

about what's going on?

You know, I'll be honest: when Rudy Giuliani got on TV and and said, yes, I followed up and I reached out on behalf of the president to ask the president of Ukraine for dirt on Vice President Biden, and he said that on television, I remember just sort of stopping, like holding my breath for half a second.

Like, did that just, what?

And then I think a day later when the president also acknowledged it, that for me was a major turning point.

And it was a turning point because we weren't just talking about secondhand accounts.

We were talking about someone, something that they admitted.

And then we were talking about something that was prospective.

It was forward-looking.

It was about 2020, not 2016.

And for me, that's, you know, that's the moment where I started to sort of really feel like the oath of office kick in.

This is about protecting a future election.

And it's saying that it's absolutely unacceptable that the

president of the United States would be asking foreigners for dirt.

And I just started thinking about where this goes from here.

If today a president reaches out to Ukraine for dirt, what's to say a democratic president in four years or five years starts to, you know, why wouldn't they reach out to China and ask for a little dirt there or North Korea or anywhere?

And I just could sort of feel the bones of the democracy being eaten away at.

And I have spent the past six months, by the way, heading up a task force, something called Task Force Sentry, with my peers.

Ever since the Mueller report came out, a bunch of members of Congress stood up this task force specifically to look at what we could do legislatively to protect ourselves in 2020 from foreign influence in our elections.

I wonder, Bill Clinton, a couple of months ago,

right after the Mueller report came out, he was at an event in Washington, that speaking tour that he and Hillary Clinton have been doing, and they were both on stage, and Bill Clinton made the same point that you just made, that a Democrat could reach out to China now.

And he said, this is how absurd it's become.

And that really struck me at that, when I was covering that event.

He was talking about the Mueller report.

And he thought that by Mueller not doing anything, that had created this situation.

And now what we see is this phone call with the Ukrainian president happened the day after Mueller testified in the House.

I totally hear your point that this is about something prospective rather than retrospective with the 2016 election.

But do you wonder at all of whether

the way that there had not been an effort, more of an effort to stop the president before this had sort of given him the feeling that there was a license to do more, to go further?

I don't know.

I can't speak to that.

I think that there was lots of people.

I mean, not myself, but there were lots of people who were certainly providing oversight and subpoenaing and calling people up to testify.

And frankly, a lot of my peers were calling for impeachment.

I mean, there was an effort.

I don't think it's fair to say that people stayed silent.

But I think,

you know, particularly,

you know,

I guess I feel like for a lot of people right now, you read into these documents what you want to see in them sometimes.

And I think the president seems to have read the Mueller report or the summary or whatever he consumed of that and thought, well, look, you know,

they don't have anything on me.

They didn't have enough.

And even though, you know, many of his cohort are now serving time or up for in the middle of litigation,

the lesson that he clearly took away is that I dodged a bullet and now, you know, maybe I'm bulletproof.

And the timing was definitely pretty amazing once I learned about it.

That, you know, that's,

you know, and he, he's the, he, he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would care.

And he clearly is acting that way when it comes to our national security.

Aaron Trevor Aaron Powell.

A big turning point in this whole process was that op-ed that you wrote with six of your colleagues, all with national security or military backgrounds

and in districts that flipped to be democratic.

Can you just walk us through how that conversation started to do the op-ed like that?

Because once it did, that was when for a lot of people,

we started to see that this was actually going to happen, where there was going to be an impeachment inquiry.

Sure.

Well, first of all, it's important to know that there's 10 of us in the freshman class who are either former military or former intelligence community.

And we basically have an unending text chain on signal that started when we were sworn in and has not really stopped.

I mean, we are in constant touch with each other.

And it's everything from the very serious, you know, how are you thinking about this bill or this piece of legislation to the very mundane, like, you know, whose kids are dressing up as what for Halloween?

I mean, it's the whole spectrum.

And when the news started to come out about Ukraine and the president and the Giuliani TV interview and the president confirming it.

We started on that same text chain to have a conversation about like, does this feel different to anyone?

Is anyone else feeling like this is a different threshold?

And

for a group of us, it definitely was.

And we started talking about doing something together.

and writing something together so that we could be clear.

For most of us

in that group of seven,

you know, impeachment is not something that our districts were necessarily pushing us to do.

And so

we sort of had a like mind about a lot of things leading up to this moment.

But because of our service background, I think this just struck us as fundamentally different.

We started writing and then editing, you know, from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado.

We were all across the country because it was over a weekend.

So we were in a, literally in a Google Doc and editing each other.

And And then all of a sudden.

Seven politicians in a Google Doc together sounds like great formula.

Yeah.

Well, you know, we're all still talking to each other and these are my closest friends in Congress.

So

we also

had very similar sentiments about what we wanted to express, that we really felt that this was about our oath of office and protecting and defending the Constitution and our institutions.

And on Monday, we all flew back into town at various times, and a few folks got together in one of our offices and kind of finished hammered out the final details and you know we had a very small group of people that were helping us on our staff so that we could get it to the Washington Post and then very importantly before it came out

we called a few senior folks in the Democratic caucus including Nancy Pelosi yes of course and and

we you know all of us again being CIA or former military like we practice the doctrine of no surprises you do not surprise your commander.

You do not surprise, you know, your leadership.

So we

reached out and did a conference call with Speaker Pelosi, among others, and let her know what we were doing and when it would arrive and our logic and our thinking, and then our feeling about hopefully the seriousness with which we were going to take this.

And she was very supportive.

She wanted to understand our logic.

I mean, she was

very positive.

positive.

And in that conversation, we expressed,

I should say I expressed, I don't want to speak for anyone else, but that it was very important that this process, if we're going to go forward with this, if that's the decision,

then we hope that any future process, like an impeachment inquiry be held, that was held, be different.

feel qualitatively different from what has come before, that it be strategic and clear and efficient.

And the country has to be brought along with us.

This cannot be an insider baseball Washington conversation, which for many, many months, it has often felt that way.

And I think that she heard us and she's been very responsive.

All right, that seems like a good place to take a break.

So we'll be back with more in a minute with Congresswoman Alyssa Slackman.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

And we're back with Congresswoman Alyssa Slockin.

So you were talking before the break about bringing people along for the impeachment.

And the Pelosi line that she has been quoting for months is the Abraham Lincoln quote about how public sentiment is everything, and that she she didn't want to move on impeachment before the public was there.

But in the end, what happened was that you and many of your colleagues did move to support impeachment before the public sentiment was there.

And now, as you're saying, you have to bring the public sentiment along.

So

are people,

a cynic might look at this and say, well, the Democrats were always going to impeach him and they were just looking for the opportunity to do it.

Is that what happened here?

Not for me.

And I don't think for any of the seven of us who wrote that Join Op-Ed.

I mean, you know, from April, I was on the receiving end of lots of folks who were

both at the national side of things, but also in the district, who were supportive of impeachment and calling my office and, you know, pushing

to have me support an impeachment inquiry, and I didn't do it.

And there was not a foregone conclusion for me that this was going to ultimately end in an impeachment inquiry because I think it's such a serious process.

It's such a big thing for the country to go through and so rare that

it's not just about whether you like or not like something that the president did.

It has to be bigger than that.

So it was not a foregone conclusion for me that we were going to get there, but the facts changed.

And like I said, when I started to hear this stuff,

it's not like sentiment radically changed overnight.

And I was suddenly hearing from every corner of my district about this.

No.

It's just that I had seen this before.

I had seen

things in my career, in my time at the Pentagon and the CIA, where you have to make a tough call that might be unpopular.

but you know it's the right thing for the protection of the country.

And this felt like that.

I assume a lot of those decisions were about classified material.

Is there anything that in your mind you can talk about that you compare it to in your head?

Well,

I haven't thought of a perfect comparison, but I've definitely, I mean, geez, there's so many things when you're in national security that you do that you know aren't perfect, but you do them because you think you're doing what the country needs to be safe.

I mean, I remember when ISIS took over huge swaths of Iraq and Syria again in 2014.

And, you know, of course, I'd worked on Iraq for many, many years.

I'd done three tours with the CIA, you know, alongside the military there.

I knew exactly how exhausted Americans were with the war in Iraq.

And

the idea in 2014 to turn around to the public and say, hey, guess what?

We have to go back in.

And we need American troops to go risk their lives again

to help this country because a terrorist group has taken over and created, you know, basically a caliphate, a mini-state.

I knew that that would not be popular.

And certainly even within the Obama administration, wow, there were lots of people who were not so interested in going back to Iraq.

But the idea of leaving a caliphate, of leaving a state that is run by terrorists to project power, to project terrorist attacks into other countries, into Europe, into our allies across the world, into the United States.

We could not let that sit there.

And I was a strong advocate for getting in even earlier than we went in.

And I knew that, you know, if I came home to Michigan and talked about it with my family and my friends, they would say, oh, I'm just exhausted by that.

Why do we have to do that?

And it's because of the risk to us and the risk to our allies if we did nothing.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So you've you've been holding a lot of events in your district and more to come.

That's a district, again, that was held by a Republican before you won it in 2018.

Are people connecting with it that way?

Are people connecting with this impeachment inquiry as the existential threat to the country that you want it to be?

I think that's an open question.

I mean, you know, I did a sort of mini-town hall today.

We're doing three of these town halls in three days in all three of my counties in my district to make sure that people are hearing from me directly about how and why I made this decision.

We did our first one today and

it was a very mixed bag.

I mean first of all the event had to end early because it was so overcrowded in the venue that the fire marshal got called.

So that gives you a sense of how interested people are right now on every side of this.

And I talk with people there who were

thankful and happy about the decision.

I talked to people who were absolutely not happy about the decision and came up to tell me about that.

There were protesters outside the venue, a small number of protesters who were very unhappy.

And then, you know, there were some people who were interviewed by some of the journalists before we even came in who said, you know, well,

I'm not for impeachment, but she's got a national security background, and if this is different, then she must have her reasons.

One of the responses that has come back from from you and your colleagues who have gotten a lot of credit for coming out for impeachment, is that there were people who were for impeachment months ago.

And among those is your fellow Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who somewhat famously got into trouble for saying in January, it's a podcast, so I'll say the exact quote, we're going to impeach the motherfucker.

I mean, is that fair that you guys are getting more credit now for this moving along than the people who were there earlier?

I honestly, I am am not looking for credit from this.

I mean, this is, especially given the politics, I was never looking to be the champion on impeachment.

And

this was something I did extremely judiciously.

And like, I just do not take it lightly.

And honestly, I don't even, the whole idea of credit to me is just completely missing the gravity of this moment.

And of course, there were people who were calling for impeachment a year ago or two years ago.

So I don't,

that's not in question.

It just, all I can tell you is why we made this decision when we did based on new facts and new information.

And, you know,

my thing is, like, a lot of us have now called for an inquiry, but most of us are not on the committees of jurisdiction.

I'm not on the Intel Committee.

I'm not on

judiciary.

I'm not on oversight.

I'm on the Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee.

And there is plenty of work to do there.

And what I hope is that the committees of jurisdiction will go and do a thorough job, but everyone else in Congress should be redoubling their efforts to work on actual legislation on things like pharmaceutical pricing and water quality and the things that matter in my state and in my

life.

And that is our job, because if we're only doing oversight, if we succumb to the pressure from the media to only focus on this impeachment inquiry, we're really only doing half of our job.

And we need to make sure that we think about this as a group.

And we don't do

all the fourth graders to the soccer ball.

We all bunch up on impeachment.

We need to play the full field.

And the full field is passing legislation that we know will help people's lives.

Let me just close with this.

You You talked about how much concern you have about this

call and everything around it in a prospective way.

It does seem like even if the House does move forward and impeach the President, it is unlikely that he will be removed from office.

It would take 20 Republican senators and all of the Democratic senators voting for it, which is a somewhat far-fetched scenario, which means that he could end up being essentially impeached, but in his mind, vindicated.

Do you worry about,

again, given that we know this call happened after the Mueller testimony went on in July, do you worry about what the president would be like in

that scenario?

And I think about this because one of the things you're working on in Congress is you were concerned about the saber rattling, I guess,

with Iran and not going to Congress for approval for any kind of force.

Are we into potentially a different state of the presidency, you think?

I don't know that it's a different state.

I know that

the president's

shown a pretty across-the-board disdain for congressional oversight.

That hasn't started now, you know, that's not starting now, that's something that's gone on.

And in every kind of small way you can imagine, you know, stuff that's under the radar that, you know, in every administration previously, you've been able to get information from, for instance, from the Department of Homeland Security, and now we can't get it.

So I don't think that

we're in a different phase.

I just think that everything's going to be amped up.

I mean, maybe that's the phase is that everything's going to be more intense, louder.

And unfortunately, that's not something that people like.

I mean, we don't like to see our country so at odds with each other.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, will the President just, you think, maybe do what he wants completely and not think about

any of the consequences of it?

Because the consequences don't seem to actually

get in his way.

I hope that's not the case.

I hope, to be honest with you, that

if that's the direction he's going to be going in, then hopefully his cabinet and other senior officials learn the opposite lesson as they watch their peers come up in front of Congress, as they watch career civil servants coming and testifying in front of committees.

I hope the message to the folks just below the President is that he may be willing to gamble his future, but you shouldn't be willing to gamble yours because law and order and rules still matter.

And

people hopefully will see the example of what's happening right now, take it to heart, and realize that it is not worth worth falling on their sword for this, not when it comes to protecting the country.

That's such a light note to end things on, but

that's where we will.

Congresswoman Alyssa Slankin, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks for having me.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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