House begins public hearings with testimonies from Bill Taylor and George Kent as president struggles to prevent investigation
Donald Trump
cared more about investigating his political rival Joe Biden than the
fate of Ukraine, according to dramatic testimony from a key witness in
the first impeachment inquiry hearing before the American public.
Less than a year before the president faces re-election, the House of Representatives began public hearings on Wednesday into allegations that Trump abused the power of his office.As Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair, gaveled the House intelligence committee into session, cameras from every major network carried the proceedings to millions of Americans, some of whom were encountering the allegations against Trump for the first time.
In an opening statement, Schiff said the hearings would explore whether Trump sought to exploit Ukraine’s vulnerability, condition White House acts on Ukraine’s willingness to help his re-election, and “whether such an abuse of his power is compatible with the presidency.”.
“The matter is as simple and as terrible as that,” Schiff said. “Our answer to these questions will affect not only the future of this presidency but the future of the presidency itself.”
Trump filled his Twitter account on Wednesday morning with video clips of his defenders attacking the proceedings. But in the hearing room, new testimony tied Trump directly to a plot to condition US military aid and a White House visit on a Ukrainian announcement of the Biden investigation.
Bill Taylor, acting US ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, state department deputy assistant secretary, were the first witnesses to be called. Taylor said one of his aides had heard Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the EU, talking to Trump on the phone in July.
“Following the phone call with president Trump, the member of my staff asked Ambassador Sondland what president Trump thought about Ukraine,” Taylor said. “Ambassador Sondland responded that Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden, which [Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy] Giuliani was pressing for.”
The opening of the public impeachment hearings was a day Trump has struggled furiously to prevent, blocking witnesses, attacking investigators and throwing up a social media smokescreen. Trump has claimed his push for investigations in Ukraine arose from his concern about corruption in the country.
“I’m too busy to watch it,” Trump told reporters about the hearings. “It’s a witch-hunt, it’s a hoax, I’m too busy to watch it. So, I’m sure I’ll get a report. There’s nothing – I have not been briefed. There’s nothing there.”
The White House press secretary tweeted that the hearings were “boring”.
In response to Schiff’s opening statement, Devin Nunes, the senior Republican on the committee, declared the proceedings “a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign” and a “low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to previous committee hearings about alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
“It’s nothing more than an impeachment process in search of a crime,” Nunes said.
The Schiff and Nunes statements reflected the broader messaging battle that has surrounded the impeachment proceedings since they were announced in late September, with Democrats accusing Trump of corruption and Republicans accusing Democrats of running an unfair process.
Three Republicans interrupted the proceedings just as the witnesses were to begin testifying with demands that the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint launched the impeachment inquiry be called to testify. Schiff rebuffed the demands.
“I am not here to take one side or the other, or to advocate for any particular outcome of these proceedings,” said Taylor. “My purpose is to provide the facts as I know them.”
Taylor described his concern to discover, last spring, an informal policy channel in Ukraine led by Giuliani, and advanced by US officials close to the White House, including Sondland.
Sondland told Taylor that “everything” – military aid and a White House meeting for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – depended on Zelesnkiy’s willingness to announce an investigation of Biden, Trump’s political rival, Taylor testified.
With a half-century of foreign service experience between them, the witnesses described a US policy of supporting Ukraine as a frontline state against what they said was a Russian assault on the “rules-based order” in eastern Europe. For the newly elected Zelenskiy, Kent testified, a White House meeting would be crucial.
“A meeting with the US president in the Oval Office at the White House” would be seen, said Kent, “as the ultimate sign of endorsement and support from the United States”.
The US demand that Ukraine pursue politically-motivated investigations, and the withholding of aide for Ukraine, undermined US efforts to promote the rule of law and threatened to give Russia a free hand in the region, the diplomats testified.
Taylor was asked what he meant when he said in a text message obtained by the committee that withholding security assistance for Ukraine to help a political campaign was “crazy”.
“To withhold that assistance for no good reason other than to help with a political campaign made no sense,” Taylor said. “It was counterproductive. It was illogical, it could not be explained, it was crazy.”
In the public hearings, which will continue for two weeks, Democrats have a two-part case to make, Briffault said: “One part is about the facts. It doesn’t sound like the president is really contesting a lot of the facts anymore, although we’ll find out as that goes forward.
Corey Brettschneider, the author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and a professor of constitutional law at Brown University, said that while the president has broad powers to exercise foreign policy, those powers do not include exercising foreign policy for his own personal benefit.
“When it comes to impeachment, the framers dedicated a significant amount of time to thinking about this,” Brettschneider said. “They made a deliberate decision to say ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, emphasizing that if the president abused power – not just committed a crime – then he or she would be removed.”
The Democrats plan to call nine additional witnesses in the space of eight days, including almost everyone they have deposed behind closed doors, with the last public testimony currently scheduled for next Thursday.
Public impeachment hearings are expected to last about two weeks, until the Thanksgiving holiday break. Upon conclusion of its work, the intelligence committee is to submit a report to the judiciary committee, which then could draw up and vote on articles of impeachment.
The full House could proceed to a vote on the impeachment of Trump by the end of the year.
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