Congress Grills Joseph Maguire Over Trump’s Whistle-Blower Scandal

Three years into the Trump administration, the US government still doesn’t know how to handle Donald Trump as president. That’s the simple conclusion from a dramatic morning in Washington, DC, that saw both the release of the nine-page complaint by an intelligence official whistle-blower and testimony about those allegations by a visibly uncomfortable Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence.

The whistle-blower complaint paints a picture of a White House in a panic after a July 25 conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. In a recently released recap of that call, Trump appears to ask for help digging up dirt on his US political opponents. The complaint itself goes even further, alleging that White House officials sought to hide digital record of that call in a computer system typically reserved for highly classified matters like covert actions. “One White House official described this act as an abuse of an electronic system, because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective,” the whistle-blower wrote.

As the whistle-blower’s complaint rippled through the US government, Maguire himself acknowledged the rarity of the situation. “I believe this matter is unique and unprecedented,” he said at one point. “It was urgent and important.”

Maguire, a former SEAL and career Navy official, had until a few weeks ago worked in relative federal obscurity as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He was elevated on August 15 to be the acting head spy for the country, after the ouster of his predecessor, Dan Coats and then-deputy director of national intelligence Sue Gordon. “I did not look to be sitting here as the acting director of national intelligence,” he told the committee.

Yet his Capitol Hill testimony before the House Intelligence Committee made Maguire the first public witness in a fast-moving scandal that has unfolded in less than two weeks. That’s when an enigmatic letter from representative Adam Schiff, the chair of the intelligence committee, first made public hints of the whistle-blower’s allegations—allegations that had landed in Maguire’s lap when he took over as acting DNI just four days after the complaint was filed.

Maguire told the committee that as soon as he read the whistle-blower’s complaint this summer, he knew it was serious, and that he’d be forced to testify about it before Congress. As it happens, that testimony came on the heels of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, announcing a formal impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s backers had hoped that the release of the White House memo—not exactly a formal transcript, but an abridged summary of the call created after the fact by National Security Council officials—would make clear that there was no “quid pro quo” between Trump and Zelensky. Instead, the release seemed the most damning document to arrive in Washington since President Richard Nixon released his White House tapes, containing a gap of more than 18 minutes missing. The call recap surprisingly pointed to how Trump tried to enlist Zelensky to work with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as well as US attorney general William Barr to investigate the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.

Far from being exculpatory, the White House’s summary of the conversation appeared to show Trump using the weight of his office and America’s foreign policy to advance his own personal political interests. The call summary also showed the president outlining how helpful the US was to Ukraine, and yet how not “reciprocal” there was. Then Trump said he wanted to ask for a“favor,” apparently focused exclusively on ginning up dirt on a political opponent rather than the interests of the US. The call recap, again in the White House’s own words, appeared to describe clearly impeachable conduct—conduct so appalling that it worried White House officials themselves.

The contents of the call left Democrats and reporters slack-jawed Wednesday as well, as Washington digested what seemed among the clearest possible cases of a president prioritizing his own political interests—and the punishment of his domestic electoral opponents—above his duties to the nation.

During his testimony, Maguire talked lawmakers through his own struggles handling a whistle-blower complaint that involved such troubling behavior by the president. The law requires him to report the complaint to Congress, but seemed to Maguire potentially covered by executive privilege that superseded his own authority as acting DNI. He ultimately turned to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—the division that serves as the US government’s own in-house lawyers—for a binding opinion on how to respond. Democrats, for their part, pressed Maguire about the complaint’s focus on the president and the head of the Justice Department. Was it appropriate, then, to ask the two main alleged conspirators in the complaint whether that conspiracy should be reported?

Schiff called it at one point a “profound conflict of interest.” Representative Val Demings, the Democrat from Florida who is a former police officer, told Maguire: “I never went to a suspect asking what I should do in their case.”

Maguire said that he had little choice in the matter—that even though the complaint went through the formal whistle-blower channels of the intelligence community, it concerned the behavior of the president, who is not technically a member of the intelligence community. Maguire added that he believed that both the whistle-blower and the inspector general acted in good faith throughout, but that his own hands were tied in whether to pass the complaint over to Congress, since it concerned matters that fell under executive privilege. It wasn’t until the White House released the transcript and effectively waived that privilege that he was able to turn the underlying complaint over to Congress, make it public, and discuss it before the committee Thursday.

Where the impeachment inquiry goes from here is hardly clear—especially since little said so far seemed likely to change the mind of Republicans who remain united behind Trump, either despite or because of the uniquely chaotic nature of his presidency.

“None of us is above the law in this country,” Maguire said at one point. The question for the country—and Congress specifically—is whether that long-standing principle applies even to the wrecking ball presidency of Donald Trump.

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor for WIRED who covers national security. His latest book, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, was published this month. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.