Trump’s Very Bad Impeachment Week Is About To Be Broadcast Live On TV
Credit to Author: Cameron Joseph| Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 17:35:03 +0000
WASHINGTON — President Trump knows if it doesn't happen on camera, it doesn't really matter. Now, the reality show president will watch the impeachment investigation become must-see TV.
This week, House Democrats will bring a trio of respected diplomats who were alarmed by President Trump’s actions towards Ukraine in for the first public testimony of the investigation. Their public testimony marks a new phase in the impeachment process — a shift from Democrats’ efforts to uncover what happened and towards explaining it to the American public.
The action will start Wednesday, when acting ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent are scheduled to publicly testify about why they were so alarmed by the Trump administration’s actions towards Ukraine. On Friday, ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will add her voice to the chorus of officials detailing the pressure campaign on Ukraine that was led by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani,.
The facts of the case will be hard for Republicans to defend. Multiple witnesses have now testified that they believe President Trump actively pushed Ukraine to investigate both the Bidens and the 2016 election — and that congressionally approved military aid to the country was held up while Trump sought to get what he wanted.
Read: The 5 Bombshells From Bill Taylor's Testimony on Trump and Ukraine
The question now is whether televised testimony of those facts will move public opinion at all — and whether there are any new cracks in Republicans’ near-unanimous defense of the president as a result. Recent polls show the country is closely divided over impeachment, with most surveys finding a majority of Americans supporting the investigation itself but about the same number of voters supporting and opposing Trump’s removal from office.
The three officials’ closed-door testimony painted an alarming picture of Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, his 2020 political rival, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine and not Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
- Taylor testified behind closed doors last month that it was his “clear understanding” that “security assistance money would not come until the [Ukrainian] President committed to pursue the investigation.”
- Kent said that “it was clear that the investigations that were being suggested were the ones that Rudy Giuliani had been tweeting about, meaning Biden, Burisma, and 2016” — and that he was told by a senior official who talked to Trump that the president “wanted nothing less than [Ukrainian] President Zelensky to go to microphone and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.”
- And Yovanovitch testified about Giuliani’s monthslong efforts to remove her from her job — and her feeling “threatened” by Trump’s sinister-sounding comments during his now-famous July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that she was “going to go through some things.”
Trump is clearly on edge about what this week will bring. He claimed in a Monday morning tweet that Democrats “doctored” the released transcripts of their testimony — an outlandish allegation that has not been backed up by any of the dozens of Republicans who participated in those interviews.
If Taylor’s and Kent’s public testimony is as bad as what they had to say behind closed doors, Trump may abandon his standard Twitter tantrum for a live rant from the White House, where he’s scheduled to hold a presser with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Cover: President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the New York City Veterans Day Parade at Madison Square Park in New York, Monday, Nov. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
This article originally appeared on VICE US.