Here & Now

Sen. Ron Johnson on Impeachment Hearings (Full Interview)

Frederica Freyberg:

Given your position and your strong support of Ukraine, what is your reaction to these impeachment hearings with the slate of witnesses who described the “Three Amigos” running the Rudy Giuliani diplomacy of this for that at the behest of the president with the military aid in the balance? What is your reaction?

Senator Ron Johnson:

Well, first of all, I think it’s very unfortunate this has been exposed and made so public. We often refer to the legislative process as sausage making. Same can be said for some foreign policy as well, and we truthfully were well underway in that sausage-making process both within the administration, but also between the branches and I think that’s one of the things I tried to offer in my response letter to the House is my conversations with the president on August 31st were, I’m the one that raised the issue after he’d already consistently given me his reason for not giving me the go ahead to tell President Zelensky that the aid was gonna be released. Corruption and lack of European support, but then when I raised the issue of some kind of arrangement, he completely denied that, but he also said tail-end of the conversation, “Ron, I hear what you’re saying. We’re reviewing it right now. I think you’re gonna like my decision.” Now that’s August 31st.

I went to Ukraine with Senator Murphy. One of the points I made there is Senator Murphy’s on appropriations. If President Trump and his deficit hawks decide not to release this, we’re the first branch of government. We’re in charge of appropriations. We’ll just re-appropriate that money in 2020, which is fiscal year 2020 which is only three weeks away, and then I also spoke to Senator Durbin when I got back. He introduced an amendment. There was Republican support for that amendment. That all happened on September 11th, right before President Trump released the aid. So this did not have to be drawn into or so publicly exposed. It didn’t have to result in an impeachment inquiry, which is some pretty serious business. So from my standpoint, my reaction is just very unfortunate that we’ve had to go through this process, and of course, it’s not over.

Frederica Freyberg:

And yet, you don’t feel as though the American people deserve to know what is happening with US aid to Ukraine and the alleged direction from President Trump and his lawyer for that country to investigate a political opponent?

Ron Johnson:

Frederica, I think the reason they describe this as sausage-making process is sometimes it’s not very pretty, but if whoever started this in motion, if their goal was to help Ukraine, solidify a relationship, they failed miserably. This has been pretty embarrassing for the new president. It hasn’t been pretty. It’s resulted in what President Trump thought was pretty important was to release the transcript of his conversation with another president of another country. That sets a very dangerous precedent. It’s gonna be very difficult for future presidents to have candid conversations with world leaders. We’ve weakened executive privilege, and again, it certainly hasn’t helped our relationship with Ukraine, so this has just been an unfortunate situation all the way around, and again the fact of the matter is producing policy, creating policy, whether it’s legislative, or sometimes foreign policy, can be a pretty messy deal, but that process was already underway. I think it would have ended successfully. This didn’t have to come to such high exposure.

Frederica Freyberg:

Let me just unpack this a little bit. Testimony from one of the three amigos, the US ambassador to the EU, said that everyone was in the loop on the President Trump directive to get the Ukraine to investigate the 2016 campaign, and Burisma, or Joe Biden’s son. You were part of meetings including that group. Were you in the loop on all of that?

Ron Johnson:

What I was in the loop in is very detailed, described in great detail in my 10-page response to the House request. And so I let my letter stand on its own. Certainly, I understood that President Trump was highly frustrated by the fact that there were rumors in Ukraine involved, that Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election.

By the way, there’s plenty of unanswered questions when it relates to that, as well. DNC involvement, Alexandra Chalupa working for the DNC, having meetings in the executive building of the old executive building of the White House.

There are a lot of unanswered questions, and I’ve always interpreted President Trump’s concern about corruption in the Ukraine to be both generally, the endemic corruption, but also, specifically, he went through a special counsel probe. I understand, I’m sympathetic with why he would want to get to the bottom of, How’d this happen? How was I exposed to all this scrutiny under a completely false narrative that my campaign cooperated with Russia?

Just from a human level, I’m sympathetic with why he’d wanna get to the bottom of that, and I don’t see any problem quite honestly with administration officials who also wanted to see that aid released, wanted to see those meetings to occur trying to figure out some way, shape, or form to change the president’s pretty harsh opinion of Ukraine and turn that situation around. I mean again, that’s that policymaking process.

Frederica Freyberg:

Top security officials and diplomats say that the Ukraine 2016 election meddling was Russian disinformation, a fictional narrative advancing Russian interests. What about that?

Ron Johnson:

Well, we’re conducting oversight ourselves and I know Alexandra Chalupa, who was an American-Ukrainian hired as a contractor by the DNC had 27 meetings in the White House during 2016. She’s admitted the fact that she gathered a group of Ukrainian journalists and encouraged them to basically spread dirt on Paul Manafort, and by the way, I’m not defending Paul Manafort, but also on the Trump campaign. So there’s plenty of evidence that there was involvement by Democrats, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, and again the press, by and large, is not particularly curious about that, which also drives conservatives, people like me and President Trump, nuts, which is why we’d kinda like to get to the bottom of those things. So again, that’s why I’m sympathetic with President Trump, who says he’d like to know what happened in the Ukraine, so do I.

Frederica Freyberg:

Back to President Trump, more specifically, do you think it’s proper for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent?

Ron Johnson:

I don’t think that’s what was happening. I’ve never heard President Trump say you know hey, dig up some dirt on my political opponent. What I heard him say is, I think something happened in 2016. President Zelensky obviously want a mandate because Ukraine is so corrupt, and I think it was a relatively simple request. Again, a very human request. I’d like to find out what happened. And we surely do want Ukraine on record making sure that they are very serious about fighting corruption. I think Kurt Volker made that point, as well. We get private assurances sometimes from countries, but it’s the public assurances that allow us to pressure them to follow through on these things, so again, it’s certainly not an impeachable offense, let’s put it that way.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, did or did not the president clearly in the transcript of his July phone call with President Zelensky mention the Bidens?

Ron Johnson:

Well, sure, and again, I can explain that. Again, the way my interpretation of that is I’d just gone through two years of unbelievable scrutiny under a completely false narrative. Vice President Biden actually admitted that he basically threatened Ukraine with the removal of our guarantee on a billion-dollar loan unless they fired prosecutor general. I can get in far greater detail that there’s also potentially a false information campaign conducted by US representatives against that prosecutor general. But I don’t want to get in too much detail, but there’s legitimate concerns, so President Trump goes I then thoroughly investigated. Why isn’t the press interested in what happened potentially with Burisma and with the Bidens? That’s how I interpreted that. Again, I have never heard President Trump say, what I want is I want to dig up dirt on my 2020 opponent. I know that’s the mantra in the press, but that was not, I don’t believe, President Trump’s motive. He just wanted to find out what happened. And I’m sympathetic with that. I want to find out what happened.

Frederica Freyberg:

Impeachment testimony says there was a quid pro quo. US aid in return for meetings and investigations. You said you winced when you heard of conditions, but that the president denied it. Why did you wince?

Ron Johnson:

Well again, I was calling up Gordon Sondland, who I think in his testimony pretty well admitted that this wasn’t directly from the president. This is just what he assumed or presumed, or might have heard from people like Rudy Giuliani. So, no, I winced because, again, I was supportive of providing that military support because Ukraine is ground zero in our geopolitical competition with Russia. This was the time to show strength and resolve and I was concerned about that signal. So that’s why I called up President Trump the day after, or he called me back upon my request, after I talked to Gordon Sondland, and tried to get him to agree to let me let President Zelensky know that that funding hold would be released. He didn’t, but he gave me his very consistent reason. Corruption, and inadequate support from Europe for military assistance.

Frederica Freyberg:

Speaking of that, Democrats, specifically the chair of this impeachment committee, says that that’s not what this was about. Let’s take a listen to what Adam Schiff said this week.

Adam Schiff:

My colleagues have tried to make the argument here today, and we’ve heard it before, that the president was just interested in fighting corruption. That’s our goal, fighting corruption in Ukraine, this terribly corrupt country. The problem, of course, with that is there’s no evidence of the president trying to fight corruption. The evidence all points in the other direction. The evidence points in the direction of the president inviting Ukraine to engage in the corrupt act of investigating a US political opponent.

Frederica Freyberg:

What’s your response to that, senator?

Ron Johnson:

I think Congressman Schiff is completely not credible. From his chairmanship chair, he read a false narrative of the transcript knowing that a lot of Americans would actually believe that’s what President Trump said. He didn’t. He lied to the American public when he said that his– that we, meaning him and his committee, had never talked to the whistleblower. He finally had to admit, no, that was a lie. Now he’s trying to get people to believe that he doesn’t know who the whistleblower is, even while he’s protecting witnesses that his committee has called because he doesn’t wanna reveal who the whistleblower is. So Adam Schiff, in my mind, has no credibility whatsoever.

Frederica Freyberg:

Do you wanna name the whistleblower?

Ron Johnson:

I think at some point in time. By the way, there is no right to, you know, protecting your name in terms of Whistleblower Protection Act. You certainly can’t be retaliated against. The Whistleblower Protection Acts actually contemplate that at some point in time, if required by the defense of whoever’s being accused by a whistleblower that those whistleblowers might have to be revealed. So I’m all for protecting whistleblowers. I think it’s vital in terms of rooting out corruption, but I also realize that all whistleblowers are not created equal. I realize some whistleblowers have a political ax to grind. That may be the case right here. I think it’s almost certainly the case, and I also agree that a president of the United States, or anybody who’s been accused, should be able to defend themselves, and part of just a basic tenet of American jurisprudence is the right to really confront your accuser. In this case, it’d be the whistleblower. So anybody that levels these kind of charges against the president of the United States basically resulting in an impeachment, he’s living– he or she is living in a fantasy world if they don’t think they’re gonna be revealed at some point in time, and by the way, the mainstream media is playing this charade. They’ve all but named the individual. They’ve all but laid out everything but his social security number and birthdate, so it’s just a well-known secret who this individual is.

Frederica Freyberg:

As for quid pro quo, the president’s chief of staff, as you know, Mick Mulvaney says, “We do that all the time in foreign policy, get over it.” So no big deal, even in this circumstance?

Ron Johnson:

Well, certainly I would agree that most foreign aid is conditioned on something. I think the American people would be outraged if it wasn’t, if we just went ahead and carte blanche just gave different countries money. There’s no form of federal government spending that’s more unpopular than foreign aid. And I think any president should be highly concerned about the level of corruption in any nation before you release hundreds of millions of dollars of hard-earned American taxpayer dollars. So, I think that’s just a given.

Frederica Freyberg:

What was your reaction to Rudy Giuliani running quote, “A shadow foreign policy, and pushing Ukrainian government to pursue political investigations of the Biden family that would benefit President Trump,” unquote, as stated by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy?

Ron Johnson:

Well, to my knowledge, I’ve only met Rudy Giuliani one time. That was during the 2016 campaign when he came in for an event in Wisconsin. That’s the last time I spoke with him, as well. So, I’ve had no contact with him. I really don’t know what he’s doing. Obviously, I read the news reports as well. I can, as a blanket statement, say his involvement probably hasn’t been particularly helpful.

Frederica Freyberg:

So, you don’t know much about it, but you don’t approve of it.

Ron Johnson:

I don’t know anything about it.

Frederica Freyberg:

If that’s what he’s doing, yeah. You say you believe the impeachment inquiry is merely an effort to sabotage the Trump administration and you lump even decorated national security members as part of that effort. Should we believe that these top-level security advisers and diplomats that we’re hearing in these hearings are lying under oath?

Ron Johnson:

No, listen I have nothing but the utmost respect for Lieutenant Colonel Vindman’s service and sacrifice to this country. Putting himself in harm’s way in a battle zone. So, I completely respect that, but that doesn’t mean that we should just not question what his actions are as it relates to this matter, which I believe has been very damaging. Again, whoever was involved in highlighting this, if their goal was to improve the situation in Ukraine, I think they failed miserably. But no, I’ve got a lot of respect for the ambassadors, whether it’s Ambassador Taylor or Yovanovitch. These people have been very good hosts when I visited those countries. They’re professional Foreign Service professionals. I value their service, but I also recognize there is a bias, and there is something going wrong within government. There has been a concerted, I think probably coordinated effort since the day after President Trump’s election to sabotage his administration. Look no further than the attorney that the whistleblower hired, Mark Zaid, who tweeted 10 days after the inauguration, with words like coup and rebellion and impeachment will follow ultimately. I think that kind of gives you some sense that maybe there’s something else going on here. Maybe there is a concerted effort to sabotage this administration that started very early in this president’s administration.

Frederica Freyberg:

Have you spoken with President Trump since you released your 10-page letter outlining your role and take on events this past Monday?

Ron Johnson:

No, I haven’t.

Frederica Freyberg:

Okay.

Ron Johnson:

No, I haven’t.

Frederica Freyberg:

Because of your close involvement with Ukraine, do you think you would have to recuse yourself from Senate proceedings to convict, should the House impeach the president?

Ron Johnson:

No, absolutely not. The people who elected me deserve representation in this process. They deserve my voice, my vote. I wonder if Senator Murphy, by the way, has ever been asked whether he should recuse himself, and I would say he shouldn’t either. So no, this is not a normal type of trial. This is a constitutional event, impeachment. Personally, I hope the House does not vote for impeachment, ’cause we all know the result, I think, in the Senate ’cause we just haven’t seen anything that’s impeachable.

Frederica Freyberg:

Meanwhile, what has all of this done to Ukraine and its position with Russia in your mind?

Ron Johnson:

Well again, I don’t think it’s been helpful. In business, any time I faced a problem I would always take a look at where’s their opportunity here? So, what I’m certainly hoping, and this is my counsel by the way when I met with President Zelensky in September fifth.

I was disappointed President Trump didn’t give me the go-ahead to say that that military support would be released, but I said, you guys, let’s minimize this. This is an end of the fiscal year issue here. There’s three weeks before the start of a new fiscal year. We’ve got an appropriate here in Senator Murphy. I talked to Dick Durbin. We will restore this funding, so let’s go out from this meeting to the press, which is exactly what I did, and say this is a budget issue. Don’t confuse a budget issue with the strong support, the almost unanimous support within the administration and Congress for the courageous people of Ukraine. And that’s been my position ever since, and so hopefully what this will do long-term, it’s been done a lot of damage to our democracy, to future presidents. Really, not been particularly helpful for Ukraine, but let’s try and turn this situation around and let’s try and gain some opportunity out of this and express America’s strong support for the courageous people of Ukraine.

Frederica Freyberg:

Senator Ron Johnson, we leave it there. Thank you so much for your time.

Ron Johnson:

Have a great day.