Twitter CEO and Co Founder Jack Dorsey addresses students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) on November 12, 2018 in New Delhi, India. | Amal KS/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
The platform’s latest policy could make it harder to combat misinformation.
Last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced his platform would not only start banning political ads, but also ads about issues like climate change, immigration, and abortion.
In typical knee-jerk fashion, cable news pundits and even Democrats praised Twitter’s move as a game-changing, responsible action that will distinguish it from Facebook’snumb-founding decision to decline to fact-check its political ads, thereby allowing politicians to pay for posts that promote any wild accusation or debunked conspiracy theory. But activists saw the bigger picture. As the founder of the Abortion Access Front, Twitter’s announced policy would have killed our nonprofit’s ability to pay for ads that promote our shows, rallies, and actions where we push back against dishonest anti-abortion rhetoric with facts.
After weeks of outcry from activists working in numerous fields, Twitter backtracked on Friday, announcing it would continue to allow some paid issue advocacy on the platform.
Yay for us, right? Wrong.
Twitter seems to have created more questions than answers. In a call with reporters on Friday, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy, and trust and safety lead, laid out some basic guidelines of the new policy. What it lacks in specifics, it makes up for in vagueness.
First off, issue advertisers must now get certified. The “How to get certified” page states groups must provide personal information, like a mailing address, which Twitter will surely keep safe. Once certified, an issue advertiser won’t be able to target people by zip code, which is not going to be helpful if, say, there’s a water crisis in a certain area of the city, but you can’t use zip codes to help raise awareness about it.
Another new rule is that you can’t promote an advocacy ad that is tied to promoting or opposing a piece of legislation, candidate, or judicial nominee. So, if you were thinking about paying for an ad to voice your concern about a judge nominated for a lifetime appointment who is on the record claiming abortion is murder, that, too, is a no-go. They also emphasize you can’t promote “prohibited advertisers.”
In the interest of transparency, I am personally a prohibited advertiser. Not Abortion Access Front, but me, personally. I was bannedfrom buying ads because, wait for it, I use profanity in my feed. That’s right. I can’t buy an ad because I occasionally drop F bombs in my own posts. FYI, swearing in a tweet is not against Twitter policy, it just makes me a prohibited advertiser. This means that if I appear at an Abortion Access Front event, or any other charity function I may give my time to, they can’t pay to promote my appearance because I am on the prohibited advertiser list. It’s a huge problem.
But the biggest head-shaker is that Gadde also acknowledged that specifics aren’t set, and that some areas will be subjective. So, this policy goes into effect on November 22 and there aren’t any specifics? What is a subjective policy? Does each ad rep get to interpret the policy as they understand it? Or worse, do they decide to accept or reject an ad based on their own “subjective” ideological leanings?
For me, this is one of the most frustrating parts of this announcement. The very reason there are endless abortion and climate debates in this country is because the media and politicians have given the “subjective” opinions of uninformed talking heads the same credibility as actual experts. Twitter’s new policy seems to further this trend by continuing to undermine our ability to promote evidence-based information.
I started Abortion Access Front because anti-abortion zealots fill platforms like Twitter and Facebook daily with dangerous and medically inaccurate quackery that has resulted in politicians using these lies as the basis for hundreds and hundreds of abortion restrictions. Yet when you watch cable news, late night shows, or presidential debates, these relentless attacks are barely mentioned.
Our mission is simple: Since the media won’t prioritize correcting all the disinformation, we will. AAF’s performers, writers, and activists spend four months out of the year doing a reproductive rights roadshow that brings comedy fans together with reproductive rights and justice activists and abortion providers for an evening of fun and community building designed to entertain and educate.
Up until last year, Twitter and Facebook ads had been a crucial tool in helping us rally folks to our events, because it’s nearly impossible to grow an audience with social media posts alone. The ads allowed us to target regions, cities, and people who have expressed concerns about reproductive rights. These ads helped us reach people who want to become more engaged, but possibly have never heard of our organization.
We need these ads, especially now. We travel almost entirely to states where the abortion bans have hit the hardest and these ads had become the last pipeline to target specific markets, where local media has become less and less willing to do stories or interviews that focus on abortion rights. Often in those markets, if we put up flyers, they get ripped down. These ads are sometimes all we have. We even tried to pay for a billboard in Minneapolis that had our name and featured a line drawing of a uterus, yet the billboard was rejected because putting “a vagina” on a billboard was too controversial. Not sure what makes me more ragey: the censorship of abortion or someone not knowing the difference between a fallopian tube and a labia.
Social media ads helped us cut through this kind of b.s. and directly reach our audience. Until changes started happening.
Before there was Twitter’s policy, there was Facebook’s. Abortion is considered a “social issue” by Facebook, looped in with elections and politics, so with “abortion” in our name, we had to become political advertisers. To do this meant giving the platform even more personal information than most Facebook users usually do.
Unlike the average Facebook user who has the option of adding their phone number, “political advertisers” are required to provide one. We are also required to provide our address (P.O. boxes are not allowed) — and now that information is public record. To be clear, this means the address of our organization is available for anti-abortion zealots to target. They already show up to our events with bloody fetus signs and bullhorns, and make threats to me and my staff on Facebook and Twitter. Why wouldn’t they show up at our offices?
And what makes matters worse — venues where we do our shows have had to also become “political advertisers” to cross promote the event with their own ads on Facebook. Many of these club owners, understandably so, don’t feel comfortable giving up their personal information, so they opt out of promoting the shows. That means, we find ourselves scrambling to work with clubs and producers who are willing to make themselves publicly vulnerable by placing an ad (especially in red states), or we have to do it ourselves, which is an unnecessary and costly burden placed on us with the hope that it pays off. For small nonprofits like mine, that is an expensive crap shoot, and spending extra money while creating more restrictions on how we can get the word out means reaching fewer people. And fewer people hearing the truth means we are less effective at helping change the narrative.
While the reach of Twitter’s ban seems uncertain for now, both Facebook’s and Twitter’s policies seem as though they were created, at best, in a vacuum of people who know nothing about issue advocacy, or worse, intentionally crafted to make it extremely difficult for nonprofits to place ads that combat the lies and misinformation about the most important issues of our time. Ironically, lies they allow to be posted on their platforms remain free of charge.
Jack D. and Mark Z. need to understand why certain issues become political. When it comes to abortion, let’s be clear: It is a one-sided battle waged exclusively by those who feel that they are entitled to make decisions about someone else’s body and destiny. Those of us who fight back aren’t being political; we are fighting for our lives.
Had they talked to those of us doing the work, maybe they would understand that and start cleaning up the mess they have created. Or at the very least, not restrict us from paying them to do it for them.
Lizz Winstead is a comedian and co-creator and former head writer of The Daily Show. Currently, she is founder and chief creative officer of the reproductive rights nonprofit Abortion Access Front.
Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs George P. Kent (left) and top US diplomat in Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. are sworn in to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on November 13, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland will testify Wednesday, along with Pentagon official Laura Cooper and State Department official David Hale.
The House is pushing ahead with its public impeachment hearings this week. And with at least nine witnesses set to testify, it’s going to be an intense one.
Three people will appear on Wednesday, including the most anticipated witness of these hearings so far, US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. In the text of his opening statement, Sondland writes he “came to believe” the White House would hold up military aid until Ukraine agreed to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s time on the board of the energy company, Burisma. Sondlad writes he was concerned about a “quid pro quo.”
Sondland also testified that his efforts were directed by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. And, Giuliani, Sondland said, acted on the “orders” of President Trump.
That echoes what he said in a late amendment to his closed-door his testimony — he updated his October testimony to admit that he told a top Ukrainian official that military aid to Ukraine was likely conditioned a public announcement into those investigations.
Two other officials will follow Sondland on Tuesday: Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary at the Defense Department, and David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs at the State Department.
House Democrats have been looking into whether President Donald Trump purposefully withheld US military aid to Ukraine and a presidential meeting in order to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations into Trump’s political rivals — namely, Joe Biden.
The cast of characters has grown immensely throughout their inquiry, and now includes three ambassadors, multiple White House, State Department, and Pentagon staffers, Cabinet members, Ukrainian officials — and even the US and Ukrainian presidents.
But wait, who are all these people? As last week’s hearing showed, tons of names are bandied about as lawmakers try to learn the full story of Trump’s Ukraine policy —or try to protect him from being impeached.
So we’ve put together a list of the main players you need to know in this drama, including all the US officials testifying in the coming days and other figures who are likely to be mentioned or whose testimony has — or may still — shape the narrative around impeachment.
We didn’t include Trump because, you know, we figured you had that covered.
The witnesses testifying, or who have testified, this week
Gordon Sondland
Sondland is a wealthy real-estate developer who donated to Trump’s inauguration; his reward was the plum posting of US ambassador to the European Union. Sondland was deeply involved in the shadow campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland arrives at the US Capitol on October 17, 2019.
In a now infamous text exchange from September 2019, William Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, texted Sondland to ask whether US military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky were being conditioned on Ukraine launching investigations into Trump’s political rivals. Sondland cryptically replied, “Call me.”
About a week later, Taylor again texted Sondland, writing, “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Sondland responded by denying that this was the case — and urging Taylor not to text about the matter anymore.
He will testify in an open hearing on Wednesday morning at 9:30 am Eastern.
Laura Cooper
She’s the Defense Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia and thus the top Pentagon official working on Ukraine. In closed-door testimony last month, she told investigators that the White House had directed the freeze on aid to Ukraine and that Kyiv was concerned by the stalled support.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesLaura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, arrives at the Capitol as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry on October 30, 2019.
She will testify in an open hearing on Wednesday afternoon at about 2:30 pm Eastern.
David Hale
Hale is the State Department’s undersecretary of state for political affairs. He’s the highest-ranking career diplomat in the foreign service. Hale reportedly told the impeachment inquiry behind closed doors that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior officials didn’t want to protect ousted US ambassador to the Ukraine Yovanovitch because it could hurt the chances of military aid flowing to Ukraine.
He will testify in a public hearing alongside Cooper on Wednesday at 2:30 pm Eastern.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
Vindman is an Army officer who currently serves as the director for European affairs on the National Security Council, working first under Fiona Hill and then under Tim Morrison as their point person on defense-related issues involving Russia and Ukraine.
Vindman listened in to the July 25 call and offered damning testimony to House lawmakers last month in which he described the president making a clear quid pro quo “demand” of Zelensky: a White House meeting in return for investigations into the Bidens.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesLt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director of European affairs at the National Security Council, arrives at the Capitol for his deposition as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry on October 29, 2019.
Vindman also testified that the White House’s readout of that call, which Trump has repeatedly characterized as “perfect,” omits some words and phrases that were said during call. Vindman said he tried to correct it but those changes were never made.
He will testify in an open hearing Tuesday morning at 9 am Eastern.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty ImagesJennifer Williams, an aide to US Vice President Mike Pence, arrives for a deposition as part of the House Impeachment inquiries on Capitol Hill on November 7, 2019.
Lawmakers presumably asked Williams what, if anything, Pence might have known about Trump’s policy toward Ukraine. According to the whistleblower complaint, Trump insisted Pence cancel his plans to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry went instead.
She will testify, alongside Vindman, on Tuesday morning at 9 am Eastern.
Kurt Volker
Volker was the US special representative to Ukraine negotiations, tasked with working with America’s European allies as well as the Russians to negotiate an end to the Russian war in Ukraine.
A career foreign service officer, Volker took on the Ukraine job on a part-time, voluntary basis but eventually got caught up in the White House’s shadow foreign policy toward Ukraine spearheaded by Giuliani. Volker stepped down in September amid the brewing impeachment scandal.
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesFormer US Special Representative to Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker departs the US Capitol on October 3, 2019.
The first witness to testify in the closed-door impeachment inquiry, Volker told House lawmakers in October that he’d tried to advance US interests while simultaneously working to dilute some of Giuliani’s influence. Yet text messages show that Volker was a willing participant — along with Sondland, Perry, and Giuliani — in the not-so-official efforts to pressure Ukraine to pursue investigations.
He will testify in an open hearing on Tuesday afternoon, starting at 2:30 pm Eastern.
Tim Morrison
Morrison joined the National Security Council when Bolton arrived at the White House and was briefly the top Ukraine official on the National Security Council, having taken over for Fiona Hill in July 2019. In his October testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Morrison essentially confirmed the quid pro quo: that Trump wanted to withhold military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty ImagesFormer National Security Council official Tim Morrison arrives for a deposition for the House impeachment inquiry at the US Capitol on October 31, 2019.
Morrison did tell the committee he didn’t think Trump did anything illegal on the July 25 call with Zelensky, but he also said that at the time he feared if the details of the call were made public it could be politically explosive and weaken bipartisan support for Ukraine. Morrison resigned from his post at the NSC in October right before his scheduled deposition.
Morrison will testify alongside Volker on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 pm Eastern.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland arrives at the US Capitol on October 17, 2019.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesLaura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, arrives at the Capitol as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry on October 30, 2019.
Fiona Hill
From 2017 to July 2019,Hill was a senior director on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating US policy on Europe, including the European Union, NATO, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty ImagesFiona Hill, former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council staff, leaves after reviewing transcripts of her deposition with the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees at the US Capitol on November 4, 2019.
Hill resigned from her position in the White House by the time the July 25 Trump-Zelensky call occurred, but in her testimony she gave a firsthand account of a tense White House meeting that took place on July 10, in the days leading up to that phone call — a meeting that’s now key to the impeachment inquiry.
At that gathering, several senior US officials — including Hill, Bolton, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland — met with top aides to Ukrainian President Zelensky to discuss, among other things, a possible Trump-Zelensky meeting, which the Ukrainians had been pushing hard for but which Bolton and Hill were reluctant to agree to at that stage.
Hill sat in on that meeting, and she testified that during the sit-down, Sondland “blurted out” that there was already an agreement in place: Ukraine’s president would get a meeting with Trump if he agreed to launch certain “investigations in the energy sector” — which she said later became clear was code for Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served as a board member.
Bolton, Hill said, reacted badly to Sondland’s announcement — abruptly ending the meeting and later telling her, in rather colorful terms, to report it to the NSC’s lawyer, John Eisenberg. “[Bolton] told me, and this is a direct quote,” Hill said, “‘You go and tell Eisenberg that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [acting White House Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up on this.’”
She will testify in a public hearing on Thursday, beginning at 9:30 am Eastern.
David Holmes
Holmes is a counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine. He overheard US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s call with Trump about “investigations” alongside Suriya Jayanti.
He is expected to testify Thursday, alongside Hill.
The witnesses who already testified
Marie Yovanovitch
Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch was the US ambassador to Ukraine between August 2016 and May of this year. A widely respected career diplomat and the highest-ranked female ambassador at the State Department, Yovanovitch was the target of Giuliani-led attacks falsely accusing her of, among other things, working to thwart President Trump’s Ukraine policy and being close to the previous Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko. That smear campaign ultimately led to her unceremonious dismissal months before her time was up.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesFormer US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch arrives at the US Capitol on October 11, 2019.
As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains, “Because Yovanovitch was ousted back in April, she can’t shed much light on the key allegations against Trump: that he pressured Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe Biden and his son in exchange for a White House meeting and withheld US military aid. All that unfolded after she left Kyiv.”
During her hearing last Friday, she withstood a real-time attack from Trump and made her case for how the president and his allies forced her out of her job as ambassador to Ukraine. What’s more, she said the administration’s actions may have increased corruption in Ukraine — not curbed it. As she departed the dramatic session, Yovanovitch received a rare standing ovation from onlookers.
William Taylor
William “Bill” Taylor is the current US chargé d’affaires for Ukraine — basically the acting ambassador at the US embassy in Kyiv. He took over for Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in May after she was pushed out by top Trump officials who falsely believed she was disloyal to the president. Taylor also served as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.
In his closed-door deposition with congressional investigators last month, Taylor said his “clear understanding” of the White House’s position was that US military aid and other assistance wouldn’t go to Ukraine unless Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. In other words, he believed there was a clearly proposed quid pro quo.
Saul Loeb/ AFP via Getty ImagesUkrainian Ambassador William Taylor arrives to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, on November 13, 2019.
Taylor’s concerns about the White House’s Ukraine policy first came to light in text messages between him and two US diplomats in which Taylor expressed his worry that pushing the Ukrainians to open such an investigation would inappropriately involve that country in domestic US politics. The envoy, who in his testimony was very open about wanting the US to strongly support Ukraine, said he was worried that the aid-for-investigations ploy would hurt American-Ukrainian relations.
He reiterated all those points during Wednesday’s opening. He also dropped a bombshell, adding that he’d learned new information last week from a staff member about a previously unknown phone call involving Trump.
Taylor did not name the staff member but described that person’s account of going to a restaurant with Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland on July 26. The staffer witnessed Sondland call Trump and heard Trump ask Sondland, over the phone, about “investigations.” Sondland said the Ukrainians were ready to move forward with them.
It was later revealed that the staffer’s name is David Holmes, and will take part in a closed-door deposition on Friday — the same day as Yovanovitch’s hearing. It’s also been reported that a second US embassy official overheard Sondland’s call with the president.
George Kent
George Kent is the current deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s European and Eurasian affairs bureau. In that senior role, he oversees the Trump administration’s policy toward Ukraine, as well as Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Based in Washington, his job is to communicate with the US embassies in those countries and ensure that the administration’s policies are being properly carried out.
Perhaps more importantly, though, Kent also served as the senior anti-corruption coordinator in the State Department’s European bureau from 2014-15 — which means he has particularly good insight into how the US government normally goes about addressing issues of corruption in countries like Ukraine.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty ImagesGeorge Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on November 13, 2019.
(Remember: Trump and his allies have argued that his demands of the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden and his decision to withhold US military aid from the country stemmed from his concerns over corruption in the country and had nothing to do with his own personal political interests.)
During his closed-door deposition, Kent explained to investigators why the White House’s “corruption” defense is bogus. “Politically related prosecutions are not the way of promoting the rule of law. They undermine the rule of law,” he said. He also detailed Rudy Giuliani’s “campaign of lies” against US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, which ultimately resulted in her early recall from Kyiv.
Kent made these same points alongside William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, during Wednesday’s first public impeachment hearing.
The rest of the impeachment cast of characters
US officials
John Bolton: Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, he reportedly said he was concerned by what he described as the “drug deal” the administration was “cooking up” toward Ukraine.
Yuri Oreshkin/TASS via Getty ImagesFormer National Security Adviser John Bolton attends a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on August 29, 2019.
However, it’s not clear how hard he tried to stop it. Bolton’s lawyers have said he is open to testifying publicly despite White House orders not to cooperate, but he is awaiting a court decision before agreeing to do so.
Catherine Croft: A State Department Ukraine expert who worked for former special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker. She told congressional investigators about calls she received pushing for Yovanovitch’s dismissal as ambassador.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesCatherine Croft, a specialist on Ukraine with the State Department, arrives for a closed-door deposition in the Capitol as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry on October 30, 2019.
John Eisenberg: The National Security Council’s top lawyer to whom multiple administration officials reported their concerns about the White House’s Ukraine policy. In their testimonies, staffers said he chose to put the transcript of the problematic July 25 Trump-Zelensky call into an ultra-secret server. He has also repeatedly concluded no one involved in the quid pro quo scheme violated the law, despite noting how unorthodox it all was.
Rudy Giuliani: The former mayor of New York City is a central figure in the impeachment scandal. In his capacity as President Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani spearheaded the campaign to convince the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. He was also instrumental in pushing the false allegations against Marie Yovanovitch that ultimately ended her stint as the US ambassador to Ukraine well before her assignment was up.
Alex Wong/Getty ImagesRudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor and current lawyer for President Trump, speaks to members of the media in Washington, DC, on May 30, 2018.
Suriya Jayanti: Jayanti is an economics officer at the US embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine. She overheard US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s call with Trump about “investigations” alongside David Holmes.
Charles Kupperman: Kupperman was Bolton’s No. 2 at the National Security Council. Kupperman was subpoenaed by House Democrats to testify, but he asked the courts to weigh in first as he had also received orders from the White House not to testify.
Kupperman, as deputy NSA, likely had an insider’s view on what was going on in the White House with respect to Ukraine. But House Democrats dropped the subpoena last week, making it unlikely Kupperman will testify anytime soon.
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesMichael McKinley, former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, walks away from a closed-door hearing at the US Capitol on October 16, 2019.
Mick Mulvaney: He is the acting White House chief of staff. Trump told him to tell the Office of Management and Budget to put a hold on aid to Ukraine. When confronted about it by reporters in October, he said this kind of thing happens “all the time” and told critics to “get over it.” (He later unsuccessfully walked back his statements.) Based on current testimony, it seems that Mulvaney was intimately familiar with the scheme to pressure Ukraine.
Rick Perry: The current secretary of the Department of Energy, Perry led the US delegation to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration in May. Along with US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and special Ukraine representative Kurt Volker, Perry was pretty bullish on Zelensky and urged Trump to work with him. His full role in the scandal isn’t clear — Perry hasn’t testified — but Trump has blamed Perry for getting him to set up the July 25 call with Zelensky.
Perry announced he would be resigning from his post as energy secretary in October but as of now he is still in the job.
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesSecretary of Energy Rick Perry speaks to the media in the White House driveway on October 23, 2019.
Mike Pompeo: Pompeo is the secretary of state, though his role in l’affaire Ukraine is still a bit murky. Pompeo listened in on the July 25 call between Zelensky and Trump. Based on testimony so far, Pompeo allowed Giuliani’s shadow diplomacy with Ukraine to happen under his watch at State. Several former officials who’ve testified have also expressed their disappointment over Pompeo’s failure to publicly defend career diplomats like Yovanovitch, who became collateral in the Ukraine scheme.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesSecretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to journalists after a meeting with President Trump at the White House on October 18, 2018.
Phillip Reeker: The acting assistant secretary in charge of European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, Reeker testified to House lawmakers that he tried to defend Ambassador Yovanovitch against attacks from Trump’s political allies, specifically Giuliani. Reeker said he wanted the State Department to issue a statement of support for Yovanovitch, which ultimately didn’t happen.
Mark Sandy: The deputy associate director for national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget, Sandy told House investigators he received no explanation for why the White House froze the military aid to Ukraine. He found the decision to be highly irregular, informed by his many years working these issues at the OMB.
Ukrainian officials
Oleksandr Danylyuk: Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former national security adviser — so essentially John Bolton’s counterpart in Ukraine through September. He took part in the July 10 White House meeting in which US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland said investigations into the Bidens were important to President Trump.
Just 10 days later, Danylyuk relayed his concerns about Ukraine being used as a pawn in Trump’s reelection campaign to US Chargé d’Affaires for Ukraine Bill Taylor and US special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker.
Per Taylor, Danylyuk remained in close contact with US officials. In early September, Danylyuk mentioned to National Security Council director for European affairs Tim Morrison that he was concerned about dwindling US support for Ukraine.
This spring, Lutsenko (who was still the prosecutor general at the time) gave interviews to the publication The Hill in which he announced he was opening investigations into Ukraine’s meddling into the 2016 elections (this is a debunked conspiracy theory that alleges Ukraine worked with Democrats to frame Russia for election interference) and into Burisma, the company tied to Hunter Biden.
Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesUkrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko sits before speaking in the Ukrainian parliament (Rada) in Kyiv, Ukraine, on December 5, 2017.
Lutsenko has sinceretractedmany of his allegations and said there’s no reason to investigate the Bidens.
Igor Fruman: a Ukrainian associate of Rudy Giuliani. Fruman was arrested, along with Lev Parnas, in October on charges related to campaign finance violations tied to illegal donations to US political campaigns, including a pro-Trump super PAC.Parnas and Fruman also allegedly lobbied to get Yovanovitch removed from her post in Ukraine.
Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesIgor Fruman arrives at federal court for an arraignment hearing on October 23, 2019, in New York City.
Lev Parnas: another Ukrainian associate of Giuliani’s. Parnas was arrested, along with Igor Fruman, in October on charges related to a campaign finance violations over illegal donations to US political campaigns, including a pro-Trump super PAC. Parnas and Fruman also reportedly began working with Giuliani in his campaign to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and to get Yovanovitch removed from her post.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty ImagesLev Parnas leaves after his arraignment in the Southern District of New York court on October 23, 2019.
Parnas is now saying through a lawyer that in May he traveled to Ukraine to tell the new administration that Vice President Mike Pence wouldn’t attend Zelensky’s inauguration unless the prosecutor investigated the Bidens. He said he did so at Giuliani’s instruction — something Giuliani has denied. There’s some doubt about how legitimate this story actually is as Fruman has also denied it.
Petro Poroshenko: the Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2019 after the election of Zelensky. The New York Times reported that, as Poroshenko faced grim reelection prospects, he became more receptive to pursuing the investigations that the Trump administration wanted: one into Burisma and the other into aspects of Ukraine’s role in the 2016 elections.
Xander Heinl/Photothek via Getty ImagesUkrainian President Petro Poroshenko talks to German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 31, 2018.
Viktor Shokin: Ukraine’s former top prosecutor who was fired in March 2016. Trump’s allies have falsely claimed that Vice President Joe Biden tried to get Shokin fired because he was investigating the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma where Biden’s son Hunter served on the board. There’s a video of Biden discussing his efforts to push Shokin out, which Trump claims is proof of a conspiracy.
Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty ImagesUkrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin holds his first press conference for media on February 16, 2015, in Ukraine.
But Trump is wrong. When in power, Shokin was seen as an obstacle to cracking down on corruption in Ukraine, and the investigation into Burisma had actually languished during Shokin’s tenure. What’s more, Biden’s push to get Shokin fired wasn’t Biden’s idea — it was Obama administration policy that originated at the State Department. Other Western governments and international organizations also embraced the view that Shokin had impeded efforts to crack down on graft in Ukraine and should be fired.
Volodymyr Zelensky: Zelensky was overwhelmingly elected president of Ukraine in April 2019. A former comedian, Zelensky had no political experience, though he literally played a president on TV. The newcomer rode a populist, anti-corruption message into office and in July won a majority in Ukraine’s parliament, known as the Rada, clearing the way for his agenda.
STR/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesUkrainian President VolodymyrZelensky attends a session of Ukrainian parliament (Rada) in Kiev, Ukraine, on August 29, 2019.
That parliamentary victory preceded the now-infamous July 25 phone call with Trump where the president asked Zelensky to “do us a favor though” and investigate the Bidens. Zelensky, an untested president dealing with a war with Russia in eastern Ukraine, needed US military assistance.
The central question of the impeachment investigation now is whether Trump, knowing this, withheld security aid to force Zelensky to pursue investigations into his political rivals.
Zelensky, for his part, has made it clear that he wants to stay out of the US political drama. Meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations in September, he said that Ukraine did not want to interfere in the US elections. “I think good phone call,” Zelensky told reporters of the July 25 conversation. “It was normal. We spoke about many things, and I — so I think and you read it that nobody pushed me.”
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on Nov. 20, 2019. | Andrew Harnik/AP
“We followed the president’s orders,” Sondland says.
Gordon Sondland, the US Ambassador to the European Union, is testifying to the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday morning in the highest-stakes impeachment hearing yet — and his opening statement has now been released.
In it, Sondland confirms that there was a “quid pro quo” imposed on Ukraine, and says that he was carrying out the “orders” of President Donald Trump.
Sondland faced intense criticism for omissions and purported failures of recollection in his October closed-door testimony, and he already submitted an “addendum” to supplement it. This is the latest version of Sondland’s account. Read it at this link, or below:
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland (center) arrives at the US Capitol on October 17, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Here’s who Sondland is, and why he’s so important to the Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Again and again during the first four impeachment hearings, Republicans had a common complaint — the witnesses were people who had never, or hardly ever, spoken to President Donald Trump.
That’s not the case for US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, who’s set to testify publicly starting 9 am Wednesday. Sondland, other witnesses have made clear, was in direct contact with President Trump regarding the effort to get Ukraine to launch politicized investigations.
But it’s not yet clear if Sondland will “recall” much about his talks with Trump on Wednesday. His initial closed-door testimony from October was remarkably incomplete, and he’s already had to submit an addendum to it. Even the revised version is still quite difficult to square with documents and other witnesses’ accounts.
Sondland did make an important admission in that addendum — he acknowledged that he did, in fact, tell a top adviser to Ukraine’s president that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid likely depended on whether Ukraine would publicly commit to the investigations. That is, he admitted to being the messenger for the most scandalous version of the quid pro quo.
Yet Sondland’s explanation for why he told the Ukrainians this on September 1 is rather bizarre — he says he simply “presumed” it was the case.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland (right) arrives at the US Capitol on October 17, 2019.
In contrast, other witnesses have said that, at the time, Sondland offered a different explanation — they’ve testified he told them he had talked to President Trump, and that this is what President Trump wanted.
And it gets uglier. Over the course of the week following Sondland’s September 1 instruction to the Ukrainians, two witnesses — diplomat Bill Taylor and NSC staffer Tim Morrison — say Sondland told them he had another conversation with Trump, and that Trump was adamant that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly announce the investigations.
Meanwhile, another witness — Kyiv-based US embassy official David Holmes — testified that back on July 26, he’d overheard a call between Sondland and Trump. Sondland, Holmes said, assured Trump that Zelensky would commit to “investigations” — and after the call, Sondland explained that this meant investigating “Biden.”
A developer and luxury hotel magnate from the Pacific Northwest, Sondland has been a Republican donor and an influential player in Oregon and Washington state politics for decades. Around the time Trump ran for president, Sondland wanted to upgrade himself from a regional power player to a national — and even international — one. There was a brief period in which Sondland foreswore Trump’s candidacy due to bad press, but once Trump won, Sondland made up for it by pouring $1 million into his inaugural committee.
His reward was being named Trump’s ambassador to the European Union in 2018, and once in the post, he quickly became notorious for his lack of discretion and aggressive behavior. And after Trump ousted the US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch earlier this year, Sondland took on a major role in Ukraine policy. He dubbed himself, Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry as the “Three Amigos,” and set about trying to build bridges to the new Ukrainian government under President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland (left) and European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic speak to reporters aboard Air Force One on May 14, 2019.
In text messages, phone calls, and meetings with officials in several different countries, Sondland worked to try and reach some sort of deal between Ukraine and Trump — a deal that involved Ukraine committing to investigations Trump wanted. Witnesses have portrayed Sondland as centrally involved in this effort early on, going back to at least late June.
At first, Sondland attempted to get the Ukrainians to commit to those investigations so Trump would grant them a White House meeting. Later on, though — he now admits — he told a top Zelensky adviser that nearly $400 million in military aid would also likely depend on an announcement of those investigations.
His behavior led Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, to raise concerns. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor wrote to Sondland in a September 9 text. Before he responded, Sondland called Trump — and then, hours later, told Taylor there was “no quid pro quo.”
What Sondland didn’t recall even after he updated his testimony
But there’s much we still don’t know about Sondland’s role in the scandal. His initial testimony was filled with claims that he could not “recall” this or that — while other witnesses managed to remember a whole lot more. Even after his addendum, here are events confirmed in documents or attested to by other witnesses that Sondland still hasn’t managed to “recall”:
Taylor testified that Sondland told him by phone on June 27, 2019, that Zelensky needed to make clear to Trump he was not standing in the way of “investigations.”
Then, at a July 10 White House meeting with both American and Ukrainian officials, witnesses said Sondland “blurted” out that he had a deal with acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, that Zelensky would get a White House meeting with Trump if he committed to investigations. He said a similar thing again after some attendees moved to a separate room, per witnesses Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill. Vindman recalls him mentioning an investigation of “Biden” specifically.
On July 19, Sondland emailed several Trump administration officials, including Mulvaney, to say he “talked with Zelensky just now,” and that Zelensky will “assure” Trump “that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone.’”
On July 25, the morning of Trump’s call with Zelensky, Sondland emailed White House staffers saying he’d spoken to Trump that morning to brief him on the call.
The next day, on July 26, Sondland was in Kyiv, and had lunch at a restaurant with US embassy official David Holmes. Per Holmes, Sondland called Trump during that lunch, Trump asked about whether Zelensky would pursue “investigations,” and Sondland assured him Zelensky would do whatever Trump wanted. After the call, Holmes says Sondland told him that Trump didn’t “give a shit” about Ukraine and only cared about “big stuff” like investigating Biden.
Beginning around August 30, other witnesses report that Sondland began telling them that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine was contingent on whether they committed to certain investigations. Bill Taylor, NSC staffer Tim Morrison, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) all report hearing this from Sondland. (Sondland’s addendum doesn’t quite confirm these conversations, but says they “would have been natural.”)
Taylor testified that on a September 1 phone call, Sondland said Trump told him he wanted Zelensky to announce those investigations, that aid would depend on this, and that Trump wanted Zelensky “in a public box.”
Morrison testified that on September 7, Sondland called him, said he’d just spoken to Trump, and said Trump wasn’t asking for a “quid pro quo,” but that he did want Zelensky to publicly announce investigations of Burisma and the 2016 presidential election.
Taylor testified that on September 8, Sondland said he’d spoken with Zelensky and told him that though it’s not a “quid pro quo,” if Zelensky didn’t “clear things up” there would be a “stalemate.” Zelensky then agreed to make a public statement on the investigations to CNN. (The statement never ended up being made, though.)
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador Gordon Sondland (right) arrives at the US Capitol to appear before Congress for a closed deposition on October 17, 2019.
There are a few common themes to what Sondland has failed to recall.
First, he has insisted that he was unaware until very late that demands to investigate Burisma had any connection to the Biden family. “I never made the connection between Burisma and the Bidens until the very end,” he said in his deposition. But other witnesses say he spoke openly about investigating Biden in July, on two separate occasions.
Second, he has managed to recall some new facts about the military aid holdup, but is still vague about parts of it. He says in his addendum that he simply “presumed” Trump was tying military aid to investigations. He also says, he soon learned Zelensky himself would have to make a statement on investigations to get the aid — but that he does “not specifically recall how I learned this.”
Finally, there are all those conversations with Trump about this topic. Sondland could only manage to recall one chat with Trump in his initial testimony — one in which, he claims, Trump insisted there was no quid pro quo. He hasn’t yet managed to recall all the other conversations with Trump he told people he was having at the time. So watch closely at Wednesday’s hearing for whether he gives a fuller account of Trump’s personal role — or whether he continues to obscure it.
It’s become clear that Trump’s strategy — and by extension, the GOP’s strategy — is to stand in the way of the House’s impeachment investigation by preventing key witnesses from testifying and by flooding the proceeding with bad-faith claims, personal attacks, and conspiracy theories.
What they didn’t say, however, was that most of the people with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s actions were being blocked from testifying by the administration. In other words, Republicans are saying that people without firsthand knowledge can’t be trusted and that those with firsthand knowledge can’t testify.
Does this qualify as obstruction of justice? And if it doesn’t quite meet the legal definition of obstruction, is it an impeachable offense?
I asked Brianne Gorod, who serves as chief counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, to explain what obstruction of justice actually means, when it does and doesn’t apply, if the president has committed it, and why we should be worried about the precedent Republicans are setting during this impeachment trial.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What is obstruction of justice?
Brianne Gorod
Obstruction of justice occurs when you corruptly influence or endeavor to corruptly influence a pending or official proceeding. That can be a court proceeding or a criminal investigation or a congressional investigation.
For purposes of criminal law, there are a number of questions that you have to ask.
One, was there an official proceeding? Two, was there an attempt to obstruct it? And three, did the person act with a corrupt or improper state of mind? That’s the criminal law.
Totally separate and apart from that, there is obstruction of justice as an impeachable offense. In the Constitution, the framers use the language “high crimes and misdemeanors.” And this can be a little confusing because they used that word crime, but they’re not referring to provisions of the US criminal code.
What they were talking about there were abuses of the public trust. Officials, including the president, using their powers in an effort to benefit themselves rather than the nation. And so it’s important to keep those two things separate because there can be obstruction of justice that is impeachable and warrants an official’s removal from office, totally apart from the question of whether the criminal law has been violated.
Sean Illing
What sorts of actions would be considered obstructing justice?
Brianne Gorod
It can be attempting to get an investigation to narrow its scope. It can be attempting to interfere with witness testimony. It can be attempting to interfere with evidence that the investigation may be trying to uncover. Basically, anything that can prevent investigators from doing their work, or anything that can prevent a proceeding from being carried out, falls under the umbrella of obstruction.
Sean Illing
Everything seems to turn on this notion of “improper purpose,” or the other phrase I hear often is “corruptly influence.” What are the kinds of things that prosecutors would look at to determine whether someone was “corruptly” influencing an investigation or acting with “improper purpose”? How do you prove intent?
Brianne Gorod
That’s a tricky question across the span of criminal offenses. After all, how do you prove what was going on in someone’s mind?
But courts can also look at circumstantial evidence to understand what was motivating the person. And so the question at the end of the day is, in the context of a criminal prosecution, can the prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person was acting with an improper purpose? Were they trying to prevent this investigation from going forward in the way that it should have with an improper reason in mind?
Sean Illing
The obstruction statute doesn’t require that justice was actually obstructed — only that the person endeavored to impede justice, right?
Brianne Gorod
That’s absolutely right. And it’s true for the criminal code and it’s true for impeachment as well. There’s certainly no requirement that the person who was trying to object instruct justice had to be successful. The point is that they were trying to interfere with an investigation.
In the case of Trump, for example, there are a lot of indications that he tried to obstruct and his subordinates didn’t listen to him and didn’t follow his commands. But that doesn’t matter. The American people should not have to hope that the president’s subordinates won’t listen to his directions.
Sean Illing
Is obstruction of justice impeachable on its face?
Brianne Gorod
Yes. It’s something that we saw in the Nixon impeachment. It’s something that we saw in the Clinton impeachment articles. And it’s something that has regularly come up in this context because it’s a prime example of the president using the powers of his office to benefit himself rather than the American people.
It’s incredibly important that we have this check on obstruction of justice because it goes to the integrity of our justice system, both within the courts and within the political process. It goes to the integrity of our constitutional system. If there have been allegations of wrongdoing, if there have been allegations of abuses of the public trust, it’s crucial that the American people be able to know the truth of what happened.
And so if a president is willing to abuse the official powers of his office to prevent the American people from knowing the truth, from knowing what happened, that’s deeply corrosive to our system of government.
Sean Illing
Let’s talk about this impeachment inquiry. Trump and many Republicans are asserting two things at the same time. First, that any testimony from witnesses who heard second- or third-hand about Trump’s alleged extortion scheme against Ukraine is unreliable. Second, that officials with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s alleged extortion scheme are immune from congressional subpoenas because the president has the right to executive privilege.
If you accept both of these claims, then a reliable testimony isn’t possible at all. Is that obstruction of justice?
Brianne Gorod
What we’ve been seeing repeatedly from this White House are really unprecedented attempts to interfere with congressional oversight and now to interfere with the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry. And it’s really quite stunning. We’re seeing abuses of executive power and an attempt to obstruct the very process that the Constitution set up to check abuses of executive power.
Under the president’s view, this impeachment inquiry is an illegitimate process even though it is in the Constitution, even though it is something the framers believed was critically important to act as a check on the presidency. And he’s engaging in all manner of efforts to undermine the investigation — calling into question its legitimacy, trying to pressure witnesses not to cooperate, making clear that he will not participate. That in itself is obstruction of justice.
Sean Illing
The president uses the media (Twitter and Fox News, in particular) to control the news cycle, to dictate coverage, to shape the narrative. If the president intentionally floods the public space with misinformation and lies intended to subvert the impeachment inquiry by poisoning public opinion — is that a form of obstruction?
Brianne Gorod
It’s certainly a very 21st-century form of obstruction. I think it’s something that has to be considered in conjunction with all of the other claims of obstruction of justice that we know about and are learning about. The president has been engaging in tweets and an effort to intimidate witnesses, to try to encourage them to not give testimony that would be unfavorable to him.
At the same time, there are indications that he has been willing to use the official powers of the office, like dangling the pardon power, in an effort to encourage witnesses not to give testimony that’s unfavorable to him. I think in considering whether the president has engaged in obstruction of justice, it’s important to consider the entire course of conduct, both the use of official powers and the bully pulpit of the presidency.
Sean Illing
There are a lot of arguments being thrown around that make the case that the president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice. The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the country. He or she has the authority to hire or fire subordinates. He or she has the authority to tell those subordinates to pursue or to not pursue investigations.
Do you buy that in any way?
Brianne Gorod
Absolutely not. I think that gets it fundamentally wrong. The founders included impeachment as a check on the presidency precisely because they recognized how many powers the president had and they recognized that those powers could be subject to abuse.
There are any number of powers that the president has that are lawful, but if you use them for improper purposes, if you use them to try to impede an investigation, to try to prevent the American people from learning the truth, that can itself be impeachable and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a power that the president could use for a lawful purpose.
Sean Illing
If I am a Republican voter or lawmaker who generally approves of the job that Trump is doing, why should Ibe concerned that he is obstructing justice? Why, in other words, is this a problem worth worrying about?
Brianne Gorod
Because the kind of abuses that the president has engaged in are deeply corrosive to our system of government. And I would imagine that Republicans, if the party labels were turned around, would be deeply disturbed by the idea of a Democratic president trying to encourage foreign interference in our elections, trying to encourage or prevent an investigation designed to uncover the truth of that.
Our constitutional system depends on checks and balances. It depends on the precept that no one including the president is above the law. And that’s something that everyone across both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on.
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on Nov. 20, 2019. | Andrew Harnik/AP
“We followed the president’s orders,” Sondland says.
Gordon Sondland, the US Ambassador to the European Union, is testifying to the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday morning in the highest-stakes impeachment hearing yet — and his opening statement has now been released.
In it, Sondland confirms that there was a “quid pro quo” imposed on Ukraine, and says that he was carrying out the “orders” of President Donald Trump.
Sondland faced intense criticism for omissions and purported failures of recollection in his October closed-door testimony, and he already submitted an “addendum” to supplement it. This is the latest version of Sondland’s account. Read it at this link, or below:
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland (center) arrives at the US Capitol on October 17, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Here’s who Sondland is, and why he’s so important to the Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Again and again during the first four impeachment hearings, Republicans had a common complaint — the witnesses were people who had never, or hardly ever, spoken to President Donald Trump.
That’s not the case for Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, who’s set to testify publicly starting 9 am Wednesday. Sondland, other witnesses have made clear, was in direct contact with President Trump regarding the effort to get Ukraine to launch politicized investigations.
But it’s not yet clear if Sondland will “recall” much about his talks with Trump on Wednesday. His initial closed-door testimony from October was remarkably incomplete, and he’s already had to submit an addendum to it. Even the revised version is still quite difficult to square with documents and other witnesses’ accounts.
Sondland did make an important admission in that addendum — he acknowledged that he did, in fact, tell a top adviser to Ukraine’s president that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid likely depended on whether Ukraine would publicly commit to the investigations. That is, he admitted to being the messenger for the most scandalous version of the quid pro quo.
Yet Sondland’s explanation for why he told the Ukrainians this on September 1 is rather bizarre — he says he simply “presumed” it was the case.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador Gordon Sondland (right) arrives at the US Capitol on October 17, 2019.
In contrast, other witnesses have said that, at the time, Sondland offered a different explanation — they’ve testified he told them he had talked to President Trump, and that this is what President Trump wanted.
It gets uglier. Over the course of the week following Sondland’s September 1 instruction to the Ukrainians, two witnesses — diplomat Bill Taylor and NSC staffer Tim Morrison — say Sondland told them he had another conversation with Trump, and that Trump was adamant that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly announce the investigations.
Meanwhile, another witness — Kyiv-based US embassy official David Holmes — testified that, earlier, back on July 26, he’d overheard a call between Sondland and Trump. Sondland, Holmes said, assured Trump that Zelensky would commit to “investigations” — and after the call, Sondland explained that this meant investigating “Biden.”
Who is Gordon Sondland?
A developer and luxury hotel magnate from the Pacific Northwest, Sondland has been a Republican donor and an influential player in Oregon and Washington state politics for decades. And, around the time Trump ran for president, Sondland wanted to upgrade himself from a regional power player to a national — and even international — one. There was a brief period in which Sondland foreswore Trump’s candidacy due to bad press, but once Trump won, Sondland made up for it by pouring $1 million to his inaugural committee.
His reward was being named Trump’s ambassador to the European Union in 2018, and once in the post, he quickly became notorious for his lack of discretion and aggressive behavior. And after Trump ousted the US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch earlier this year, Sondland took on a major role in Ukraine policy. He dubbed himself, Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry as the “Three Amigos,” and set about trying to build bridges to the new Ukrainian government under President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland (left) and European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic speak to reporters aboard Air Force One on, May 14, 2019.
In text messages, phone calls, and meetings with officials in several different countries, Sondland worked to try and reach some sort of deal between Ukraine and Trump — a deal that involved Ukraine committing to investigations Trump wanted. Witnesses have portrayed Sondland as centrally involved in this effort early on, going back at least to late June.
At first, Sondland attempted to get the Ukrainians to commit to those investigations so Trump would grant them a White House meeting. Later on, though — he now admits — he told a top Zelensky adviser that nearly $400 million in military aid would also likely depend an announcement of those investigations.
And his behavior led Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, to raise concerns. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor wrote to Sondland in a September 9 text. Before he responded, Sondland called Trump — and then, hours later, told Taylor there was “no quid pro quo.”
What Sondland didn’t recall even after he updated his testimony
But there’s much we still don’t know about Sondland’s role in the scandal. His initial testimony was filled with claims that he could not “recall” this or that — while other witnesses managed to remember a whole lot more. Even after his addendum, here are events confirmed in documents or attested to by other witnesses that Sondland still hasn’t managed to “recall”:
Taylor testified that Sondland told him by phone on June 27, 2019, that Zelensky needed to make clear to Trump he was not standing in the way of “investigations.”
Then, at a July 10 White House meeting with both American and Ukrainian officials, witnesses said Sondland “blurted” out that he had a deal with acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, that Zelensky would get a White House meeting with Trump if he committed to investigations. He said a similar thing again after some attendees moved to a separate room, per witnesses Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill. Vindman recalls him mentioning an investigation of “Biden” specifically.
On July 19, Sondland emailed several Trump administration officials, including Mulvaney, to say he “talked with Zelensky just now,” and that Zelensky will “assure” Trump “that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone.’”
On July 25, the morning of Trump’s call with Zelensky, Sondland emailed White House staffers to say he’d spoken to Trump that morning to brief him on the call.
The next day, on July 26, Sondland was in Kyiv, and had lunch at a restaurant with US embassy official David Holmes. Per Holmes, Sondland called Trump during that lunch, Trump asked about whether Zelensky would pursue “investigations,” and Sondland assured him Zelensky would do whatever Trump wanted. After the call, Holmes says Sondland told him that Trump didn’t “give a shit” about Ukraine and only cared about “big stuff” like investigating Biden.
Beginning around August 30, other witnesses report that Sondland began telling them that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine was contingent on whether they committed to certain investigations. Bill Taylor, NSC staffer Tim Morrison, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) all report hearing this from Sondland. (Sondland’s addendum doesn’t quite confirm these conversations, but says they “would have been natural.”)
Taylor testified that on a September 1 phone call, Sondland said Trump told him he wanted Zelensky to announce those investigations, that aid would depend on this, and that Trump wanted Zelensky “in a public box.”
Morrison testified that on September 7, Sondland called him, said he’d just spoken to Trump, and said Trump wasn’t asking for a “quid pro quo,” but that he did want Zelensky to publicly announce investigations of Burisma and the 2016 presidential election.
Taylor testified that on September 8, Sondland said he’d spoken with Zelensky and told him that though it’s not a “quid pro quo,” if Zelensky didn’t “clear things up” there would be a “stalemate.” Zelensky then agreed to make a public statement on the investigations to CNN. (The statement never ended up being made, though.)
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Ambassador Gordon Sondland (right) arrives at the US Capitol to appear before Congress for a closed deposition, on October 17, 2019.
There are a few common themes to what Sondland has failed to recall.
First, he has insisted that he was unaware until very late that demands to investigate Burisma had any connection to the Biden family. “I never made the connection between Burisma and the Bidens until the very end,” he said in his deposition. But other witnesses say he spoke openly about investigating Biden in July, on two separate occasions.
Second, he has managed to recall some new facts about the military aid holdup, but is still vague about parts of it. He says in his addendum that he simply “presumed” Trump was tying military aid to investigations. He also says, he soon learned Zelensky himself would have to make a statement on investigations to get the aid — but that he does “not specifically recall how I learned this.”
Finally, there are all those conversations with Trump about this topic. Sondland could only manage to recall one chat with Trump in his initial testimony — one in which, he claims, Trump insisted there was no quid pro quo. He hasn’t yet managed to recall all the other conversations with Trump he told people he was having at the time. So watch closely at Wednesday’s hearing for whether he gives a fuller account of Trump’s personal role — or whether he continues to obscure it.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, National Security Council Director for European Affairs, testifies before the House Intelligence Committee. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Two Today, Explained episodes explore what we learned from Vindman, Volker, Williams, and Morrison.
Last week, three people testified in the public impeachment inquiry by House Democrats. This week, there are nine witnesses. On Tuesday, four people shared two hearings. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (a National Security Council staffer) and Jennifer Williams (State Department official detailed to the vice president’s office) testified in the morning, and Kurt Volker (former US special representative for Ukraine) and Tim Morrison (another National Security Council staffer) followed up in the afternoon.
Because both Vindman and Williams have already testified behind closed doors, we didn’t get any new bombshells. The point of this hearing in Democrats’ eyes, as Vox’s Andrew Prokop says on Today, Explained, was to bring two people who were both on the July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky, and who both agreed it was inappropriate.
The other two witnesses on Tuesday, Volker and Morrison, were requested by Republicans with the idea that they’d be more favorable to President Trump. But they ended up confirming key parts of the case against Trump, writes Vox’s Zack Beauchamp.
To tackle Tuesday’s marathon impeachment sessions, Today, Explained, Vox’s daily explainer podcast, split the breakdown with Vox’s Andrew Prokop into two parts.
It’s become clear that Trump’s strategy — and by extension, the GOP’s strategy — is to stand in the way of the House’s impeachment investigation by preventing key witnesses from testifying and by flooding the proceeding with bad-faith claims, personal attacks, and conspiracy theories.
What they didn’t say, however, was that most of the people with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s actions were being blocked from testifying by the administration. In other words, Republicans are saying that people without firsthand knowledge can’t be trusted and that those with firsthand knowledge can’t testify.
Does this qualify as obstruction of justice? And if it doesn’t quite meet the legal definition of obstruction, is it an impeachable offense?
I asked Brianne Gorod, who serves as chief counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, to explain what obstruction of justice actually means, when it does and doesn’t apply, if the president has committed it, and why we should be worried about the precedent Republicans are setting during this impeachment trial.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What is obstruction of justice?
Brianne Gorod
Obstruction of justice occurs when you corruptly influence or endeavor to corruptly influence a pending or official proceeding. That can be a court proceeding or a criminal investigation or a congressional investigation.
For purposes of criminal law, there are a number of questions that you have to ask.
One, was there an official proceeding? Two, was there an attempt to obstruct it? And three, did the person act with a corrupt or improper state of mind? That’s the criminal law.
Totally separate and apart from that, there is obstruction of justice as an impeachable offense. In the Constitution, the framers use the language “high crimes and misdemeanors.” And this can be a little confusing because they used that word crime, but they’re not referring to provisions of the US criminal code.
What they were talking about there were abuses of the public trust. Officials, including the president, using their powers in an effort to benefit themselves rather than the nation. And so it’s important to keep those two things separate because there can be obstruction of justice that is impeachable and warrants an official’s removal from office, totally apart from the question of whether the criminal law has been violated.
Sean Illing
What sorts of actions would be considered obstructing justice?
Brianne Gorod
It can be attempting to get an investigation to narrow its scope. It can be attempting to interfere with witness testimony. It can be attempting to interfere with evidence that the investigation may be trying to uncover. Basically, anything that can prevent investigators from doing their work, or anything that can prevent a proceeding from being carried out, falls under the umbrella of obstruction.
Sean Illing
Everything seems to turn on this notion of “improper purpose,” or the other phrase I hear often is “corruptly influence.” What are the kinds of things that prosecutors would look at to determine whether someone was “corruptly” influencing an investigation or acting with “improper purpose”? How do you prove intent?
Brianne Gorod
That’s a tricky question across the span of criminal offenses. After all, how do you prove what was going on in someone’s mind?
But courts can also look at circumstantial evidence to understand what was motivating the person. And so the question at the end of the day is, in the context of a criminal prosecution, can the prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person was acting with an improper purpose? Were they trying to prevent this investigation from going forward in the way that it should have with an improper reason in mind?
Sean Illing
The obstruction statute doesn’t require that justice was actually obstructed — only that the person endeavored to impede justice, right?
Brianne Gorod
That’s absolutely right. And it’s true for the criminal code and it’s true for impeachment as well. There’s certainly no requirement that the person who was trying to object instruct justice had to be successful. The point is that they were trying to interfere with an investigation.
In the case of Trump, for example, there are a lot of indications that he tried to obstruct and his subordinates didn’t listen to him and didn’t follow his commands. But that doesn’t matter. The American people should not have to hope that the president’s subordinates won’t listen to his directions.
Sean Illing
Is obstruction of justice impeachable on its face?
Brianne Gorod
Yes. It’s something that we saw in the Nixon impeachment. It’s something that we saw in the Clinton impeachment articles. And it’s something that has regularly come up in this context because it’s a prime example of the president using the powers of his office to benefit himself rather than the American people.
It’s incredibly important that we have this check on obstruction of justice because it goes to the integrity of our justice system, both within the courts and within the political process. It goes to the integrity of our constitutional system. If there have been allegations of wrongdoing, if there have been allegations of abuses of the public trust, it’s crucial that the American people be able to know the truth of what happened.
And so if a president is willing to abuse the official powers of his office to prevent the American people from knowing the truth, from knowing what happened, that’s deeply corrosive to our system of government.
Sean Illing
Let’s talk about this impeachment inquiry. Trump and many Republicans are asserting two things at the same time. First, that any testimony from witnesses who heard second- or third-hand about Trump’s alleged extortion scheme against Ukraine is unreliable. Second, that officials with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s alleged extortion scheme are immune from congressional subpoenas because the president has the right to executive privilege.
If you accept both of these claims, then a reliable testimony isn’t possible at all. Is that obstruction of justice?
Brianne Gorod
What we’ve been seeing repeatedly from this White House are really unprecedented attempts to interfere with congressional oversight and now to interfere with the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry. And it’s really quite stunning. We’re seeing abuses of executive power and an attempt to obstruct the very process that the Constitution set up to check abuses of executive power.
Under the president’s view, this impeachment inquiry is an illegitimate process even though it is in the Constitution, even though it is something the framers believed was critically important to act as a check on the presidency. And he’s engaging in all manner of efforts to undermine the investigation — calling into question its legitimacy, trying to pressure witnesses not to cooperate, making clear that he will not participate. That in itself is obstruction of justice.
Sean Illing
The president uses the media (Twitter and Fox News, in particular) to control the news cycle, to dictate coverage, to shape the narrative. If the president intentionally floods the public space with misinformation and lies intended to subvert the impeachment inquiry by poisoning public opinion — is that a form of obstruction?
Brianne Gorod
It’s certainly a very 21st-century form of obstruction. I think it’s something that has to be considered in conjunction with all of the other claims of obstruction of justice that we know about and are learning about. The president has been engaging in tweets and an effort to intimidate witnesses, to try to encourage them to not give testimony that would be unfavorable to him.
At the same time, there are indications that he has been willing to use the official powers of the office, like dangling the pardon power, in an effort to encourage witnesses not to give testimony that’s unfavorable to him. I think in considering whether the president has engaged in obstruction of justice, it’s important to consider the entire course of conduct, both the use of official powers and the bully pulpit of the presidency.
Sean Illing
There are a lot of arguments being thrown around that make the case that the president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice. The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the country. He or she has the authority to hire or fire subordinates. He or she has the authority to tell those subordinates to pursue or to not pursue investigations.
Do you buy that in any way?
Brianne Gorod
Absolutely not. I think that gets it fundamentally wrong. The founders included impeachment as a check on the presidency precisely because they recognized how many powers the president had and they recognized that those powers could be subject to abuse.
There are any number of powers that the president has that are lawful, but if you use them for improper purposes, if you use them to try to impede an investigation, to try to prevent the American people from learning the truth, that can itself be impeachable and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a power that the president could use for a lawful purpose.
Sean Illing
If I am a Republican voter or lawmaker who generally approves of the job that Trump is doing, why should Ibe concerned that he is obstructing justice? Why, in other words, is this a problem worth worrying about?
Brianne Gorod
Because the kind of abuses that the president has engaged in are deeply corrosive to our system of government. And I would imagine that Republicans, if the party labels were turned around, would be deeply disturbed by the idea of a Democratic president trying to encourage foreign interference in our elections, trying to encourage or prevent an investigation designed to uncover the truth of that.
Our constitutional system depends on checks and balances. It depends on the precept that no one including the president is above the law. And that’s something that everyone across both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on.
A 2017 protest in New York City for a $15 an hour minimum wage. | Erik Mcgregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
There’s still disagreement. But it looks like in many cases, pay raises swamp any lost jobs.
For at least the last 25 years, labor economists have been compiling reams of evidence trying to answer one big question: Do minimum wage laws cost us jobs?
In introductory economics courses, students are typically taught that setting price floors — on milk, oil, or labor — causes supply to exceed demand. In the case of labor, what that means is that if there’s a minimum wage, employers’ demand for workers falls (because they cost more), and the supply of workers increases (because they’re promised more money) — meaning there’s unemployment, with all the costs and suffering that entails.
For a long time, that’s how the theory went. But in 1993, economists Alan Krueger and David Card brought hard data to bear on the question and published a groundbreaking paper that forced economists to reconsider the issue.
Card and Krueger expanded their results into a well-regarded book, Myth and Measurement(1995), and the empirical literature on the question exploded after that.
In the ensuing quarter-century, economic research has put to rest what had been a fundamental assumption — that low minimum wages always cause major disemployment in the short run. Instead, researchers have discovered a gamut of results. Some have found real employment effects (if short of seriously disruptive effects as previously assumed), but a new evidence review finds that most studies have found small or no effects.
The comprehensive review of the evidence on minimum wages, conducted by Arindrajit Dube for the British government, seeks to summarize the current evidence base, a quarter-century after Card and Krueger’s pioneering work. Dube, a professor of economics at UMass Amherst, is one of the leading experts on the effects of minimum wage laws within economics, and his research has typically found small employment effects, if any, from the policy.
In his new paper, Dube finds that the average effect on employment across the studies he reviews is very close to zero — that is, in most of the high-quality studies he reviews, a few outliers aside, the number of jobs cost by minimum wage laws is negligible. They raise wages without much downside.
The review also builds on a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Dube, Doruk Cengiz, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer that examined 138 different changes in the minimum wage from 1979 to 2016. The paper found that on average, “overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over the five years following the increase.” Moreover, the paper identifies a macroeconomic quirk in the late 1980s/early 1990s that, once accounted for, helps resolve some disagreement in the literature.
The paper certainly doesn’t put to rest the debate over minimum wage studies. Skeptics remain. There is still disagreement about the scale of employment effects, and about what new minimum wage laws setting minimums as high as $15 an hour could do.
We also don’t know everything about why minimums don’t seem to cause a huge amount of job loss. Firms seem to pass on some of the costs to consumers, and in some cases have “monopsony” power: if employees have only a handful of potential employers to choose from, those employers can get away with paying workers less, because they have fewer exit options.
In some ways, this is the most vital research field at the moment. “It’s much more interesting to think of the minimum wage as a flashlight into the labor market than to always wind up debating the employment effect,” Suresh Naidu at Columbia says.
But we do know a fair bit more than we did in 1993, and the evidence we have now suggests that in many cases minimum wages are anet good for workers — even if a few workers lose jobs, those costs are significantly outstripped by increased wages for workers who keep their jobs. Whether that will remain true with minimums of $15 or more, especially in rural areas, remains to be seen.
What the new evidence review says
Dube’s new review was conducted at the request of a surprising source: the Conservative government of the United Kingdom. The Conservative cabinet has proposed gradually raising the country’s minimum wage to £10.50 an hour (about $15) by 2024, whereas Labour wants to raise it to £10 an hour ($14.28) immediately. In sharp contrast to the US, the debate there is about the speed and level of minimum wage increases, rather than on whether or not they occur at all.
Dube thus focuses heavily on the UK’s own experience launching a national minimum wage in 1998, exactly 60 years after the US set a national minimum. But he also reviews the evidence in the US, including more recent studies in cities like Seattle, Chicago, Washington DC, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, as well as studies examining minimum wage increases in Hungary and Germany. Dube collects 55 estimates of the minimum wage’s impact on employment across the world, including 36 estimates from the US, and two estimates for the US and UK that he produced for the report.
Throughout he seeks to estimate the “own-wage elasticity” (OWE) in each context: the increase in wages for a given group caused by an increase in the minimum wage, divided by the change in that group’s probability of employment caused by the minimum wage increase. An OWE of negative 1, for instance, is a “break-even” number: If wages for, say, fast food workers rise 10 percent following a minimum wage increase, then an OWE of -1 suggests odds of employment would fall 10 percent in turn.
The median study looking at a broad group of low-wage workers estimates an “elasticity” of -0.04; that is, a 25-percent increase in average wages for a given group due to a minimum wage increase should lead to a 1 percent decline in employment for that group. That’s a really small effect, and one that suggests the benefits of a modest minimum wage hike should swamp the costs.
Arindrajit Dube, University of Massachusetts Amherst, National Bureau of Economic Research and IZA Institute of Labor Economics
Studies looking at smaller groups of workers more likely to be bound by a minimum wage, like teenagers, find bigger effects: if you include studies looking at any size of group, the average OWE is -0.17. But that still implies that disemployment effects are swamped by higher wages.
That evidence base is enough for many labor economists, like Harvard’s Larry Katz, to conclude that we know reasonably well that modest minimum wage increases do more good than harm. “I’ve had many students on both sides of these debates,” Katz says. “When [minimum wages] affect non-traded goods sectors, which is largely true in the US, they clearly increase the wages for low-wage workers impacted. They seem to have very modest impacts on employment.”
The evolution of minimum wage studies
Dube’s review is the latest salvo in a contentious debate that has evolved in interesting directions. When modern minimum wage research began in the 1990s, there were two dominant approaches.
One approach, pioneered by Card and Krueger, compared border counties in neighboring states, one of which increased the minimum wage and one of which didn’t. The other, used by UC Irvine’s David Neumark and the Fed Board of Governors’ William Wascher, tracked employment in full states over time, to see if employment fell in the wake of a minimum wage increase. The two methodologies tended to get different results: Card and Krueger, of course, found no employment effects, while Neumark and Wascher tended to find substantial job loss following minimum wage increases.
Each approach, however, had drawbacks. Card and Krueger’s approach focused on one specific case — New Jersey’s minimum wage hikes — that might not generalize to the country as a whole. The minimum wage increase also might have forced Pennsylvania employers to raise their wages in response, which could make Pennsylvania a bad control group: it’s not unaffected by the minimum wage increase in New Jersey, it’s also affected.
The Neumark/Wascher approach, by contrast, relied on comparisons between states that might otherwise be very different. There are a million reasons why, say, employment might have grown more slowly in California following a minimum wage increase than in Arizona. Neumark and Wascher generally used few “control” variables in an effort to keep the comparison clean and avoid “over-controlling” and accidentally ignoring effects that are due to the minimum wage, but critics argued this could lead them to erroneously blame the minimum wage for job losses that were totally unrelated.
The varying approaches could lead to different evidence reviews drawing quite different conclusions. A 2007 paper by Neumark and Wascher concluded that the “most credible” studies found that the minimum wage costs a substantial number of jobs. Meanwhile, a paper by Dale Belman and Paul Wolfson first published in 2015 found that most credible research estimates minimal effect on jobs.
One thing that happened between 2007 and 2015 is that economists devised better methods. Researchers led by Dube have pioneered a new method of border-county comparisons that extends nationally: starting in a 2010 paper, Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich compared “all contiguous county-pairs in the United States that are located on opposite sides of a state border,” a vast expansion of the general Card-Krueger approach. That creates a much larger sample and enables a nationwide study, rather than one limited to just, say, New Jersey.
That study found no noticeable effect on employment. It also tested for spillovers — an increased minimum wage in one state raising wages in the state next door — and found they were negligible.
More recently in their 2019 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper, Dube, Cengiz, Lindner, and Zipperer find that much of the disagreement between the Card/Krueger and Neumark/Wascher approaches is attributable to a quirk in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During that period, blue states experienced an economic downturn relative to red states that predated the biggest blue state minimum wage increases; that made it look like minimum wages were lowering employment growth, when what was really happening was that blue states both had lower employment growth and separately increased their minimum wages.
“In our QJE paper we showed that the specifications under argument (lot of controls, little controls) actually all suggest little job loss in the post 1995 period; and that this appears to be driven by the quirky 80s boom/bust,” Dube told me. “None of us knew this until recently. This is actually progress.”
What skeptics argue
But new research arguing for substantial disemployment effects has emerged too. Jonathan Meer of Texas A&M and Jeremy West of UC Santa Cruz in a 2016 paper found that while short-run employment isn’t affected by increases in the minimum wage, states that raised their minimums saw slower job growth in subsequent years.
This makes some intuitive sense: you might expect a coffee shop that sees its wage minimum rise from $9 to $12, say, to not actively lay off any employees, but to hire fewer people in the future. Meer and West argued that focusing on employment levels, rather than rates, produced much of the disagreement in the literature up to that point, because it made estimates sensitive to what trends in employment existed before the minimum wage increase.
This led to a fierce back and forth between Meer and West and Dube. Dube in a 2013 study argued that the job growth slowdown in Meer and West showed up disproportionately in manufacturing, where wages are too high to be affected by the minimum wage, suggesting that their model picked up some noise that wasn’t related to the minimum wage at all — and added that using his methodology to look at employment growth, you didn’t find any effects at all.
Meer and West countered that when you add appropriate controls, the industries seeing slower job growth aren’t weird or surprising; a recent paper by Doruk Cengiz using machine learning to decompose the employment effects that Meer and West discuss suggests they’re mostly among higher-wage individuals, which bolsters Dube’s critique.
Another skeptic, UC San Diego’s Jeffrey Clemens, had one paper included in Dube’s review. Written with Michael Wither, it estimated significant job losses due to the 2007 increase in the federal minimum wage amidst the Great Recession.
Clemens argues that other important studies did not get sufficient emphasis in Dube’s review. He names, for instance, a paper by MIT’s John Horton where an online labor market — it’s not Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but that’s a good comparison — randomly imposed minimum wages for some firms posting jobs, and not others. The firms with minimums reduced hiring and hours worked, pivoting away from low-productivity workers to high-productivity ones. That’s a true experiment, and one that suggests some disemployment effects.
Clemens also points to a Danish study examining youth employment. Denmark’s union-negotiated minimum wages kick in at age 18, and, sure enough, the study finds that employment drops by a third when 17-year-olds turn 18, suggesting large-scale unemployment due to a minimum wage.
Dube actually did include this one in his study, but notes it’s a very different policy from a broad-based minimum wage. “Employers can costlessly substitute higher paid, slightly older workers for identical but lower-paid, slightly younger ones,” in Denmark, he says. “There is very clear reason why you’d expect more job loss in this context, but there is no equivalent for this for, say, a broad based minimum wage policy.”
The online and Denmark studies use extremely credible designs that are arguably better than most of the cross-border or cross-state comparisons that dominate minimum wage research. But they lack “external validity”: it’s not clear that an online task marketplace is a good model for the US labor market, to say the least, and the Denmark example has the problems that Dube notes.
Photo by Erik Mcgregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty ImagesSeveral of workers protest for a $15 minimum wage near a McDonald’s in New York City, February 13, 2017
A $15 minimum wage
Another study that Dube includes in his review deserves special comment.
Seattle, Washington was one of the first major cities to vote to gradually increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour, and the University of Washington has been conducting a large-scale ongoing study to see what effect that hike has. The most recent report from the study suggests that increasing the minimum to $13 an hour reduced work hours, but raised wages by enough that low-income workers as a whole were better off on average. That doesn’t mean that all low-income workers were better off, though, and the study suggests that many had to find work outside Seattle to supplement their incomes.
An earlier study from the project found much larger negative effects on employment. That study came under intense criticism for data limitations (it doesn’t include employers with locations both in Seattle and outside, because the part of Washington outside of Seattle serves as the control group). The effects it estimated were extremely large relative to other studies in the literature, and many labor economists like Harvard’s Lawrence Katz don’t find the research reliable. “The Seattle study is completely uninformative because there’s no comparison group for Seattle,” Katz says. “It’s the fastest growing labor market we’ve basically ever seen.”
Reliable or not, the Seattle studies have gotten outsized attention because they represent the first wave of studies on the new mega-increases in the minimum wage following the Fight for $15 movement. California, DC, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York are all gradually increasing their minimums to $15 an hour; even more rural/lower-wage states like Arkansas, Maine, and Missouri are gradually increasing their minimums to $11 or $12.
Dube notes in his review that the best evidence we have suggests minimal job impacts on minimum wages of up to 60 percent of the median wage. The median hourly wage in El Centro, California is about $15.50, meaning the $13 an hour minimum (effective January 1 of next year) is over 80 percent of the median wage there. The effects there might be very different.
Dube addresses this concern in his review, noting that a recent study looking at counties that have already raised their minimum wages to over 80 percent of the median wage still found minimal effects.
But there’s sure to be additional research as the new wages are phased in, and everyone in the debate, from Dube to Meer, thinks there’s some point where the disemployment effects become too large. What we don’t know is if any wage increases passed to this point will reach that level.
“Most of the $15 minimum wage proposals are phased in over multiple years and are probably like $11/$12 today,” Katz notes. “If you told me we’re going to $15 tomorrow I would worry about low-wage states. If you told me over five, six, seven years, I’m not super-worried.”
Clemens and AEI’s Michael Strain are doing precommitted studies on the minimum wage — where they agree to use a certain kind of analysis ahead of time — to ensure they don’t change analytical method to get a specific result later. So far they’ve found mixed results, with bigger job losses from bigger increases and little effect from smaller increases in the minimum wage. And they’re hardly the only ones who will be looking.
This debate will rage for a while
It’s easy to become pessimistic about the prospect that new research can dissolve old disagreements. Economists Zubin Jelveh, Bruce Kogut, and Suresh Naidu have found that you can predict, pretty accurately, most economists’ views on whether the minimum wage costs jobs based on their existing political leanings.
That doesn’t mean that the researchers working on the question are dishonest — everyone agrees that Dube, Neumark, etc. are all incredibly smart conscientious researchers who just happen to disagree on this topic. But it does reflect that there are structural forces at work here. There are big monied interests opposed to minimum wage increases, and smaller but real monied interests (specifically unions) supportive of them, and that political economy naturally leads to a polarized knowledge base over time.
“You’ve got to make some normative judgments, which make economists really uncomfortable,” Strain says. Is it worth accepting a risk of higher disemployment for higher wages overall — which seems to be a reliable result of minimum wage increases? How high a risk of disemployment are you willing to accept so that the workers who don’t get laid off get raises?
At this point, personally, I think the trade-off at most margins suggests a higher minimum wage is a good idea. As Dube’s review suggests, most estimates of the employment elasticity aren’t close to -1, despite some studies finding effects in that range. That’s a wonky way of saying that even if employment falls, it falls by less than wages rise by, and as such the benefits for low-wage workers seem to swamp any employment effects.
I’ve very open to that changing as minimums get higher. But we do seem to have learned something very important since the initial Card/Krueger wave: the old assumption that minimum wages are always unacceptably distortionary doesn’t really hold water. They’re often beneficial and at what point they stop being beneficial is something we can test empirically rather than relying just on theory.
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Cornelius Reign Allen 