The Biggest Moments of the First Live Impeachment Hearings
Credit to Author: Greg Walters| Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2019 16:19:48 +0000
WASHINGTON — President Trump may want to find something else to do during his “executive time,” because he’s not going to like what he sees on TV Wednesday.
Democrats spent weeks preparing for their televised impeachment proceedings, grilling over a dozen current and former Trump administration officials behind closed doors. Now, they’ve rolled out two men widely considered among the most credible — and dangerous — witnesses against the president, to help build public support for booting Trump from office.
Trump stands accused of overseeing a shadowy diplomatic pressure campaign aimed at pushing Ukraine to gin up investigations against his Democratic enemies in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in vital military aid.
At the witness table are Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, the State Department official responsible for overseeing Ukraine policy.
Both have already provided explosive testimony linking Trump and his top officials to that backdoor diplomatic outreach outside the usual State Department channels — involving White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Trump’s private attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Here are the major moments from today’s events on Capitol Hill.
Here's Rep. Adam Schiff's stunning indictment of Trump
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) laid out a detailed, troubling case against President Trump in his opening statement, framing the key questions he argued should determine whether Trump remained in office.
“The questions presented by this impeachment inquiry are whether President Trump sought to exploit that ally’s vulnerability and invite Ukraine’s interference in our elections? Whether President Trump sought to condition official acts, such as a White House meeting or U.S. military assistance, on Ukraine’s willingness to assist with two political investigations that would help his reelection campaign? And if President Trump did either, whether such an abuse of his power is compatible with the office of the presidency?”
The chairman then laid out Democrats’ case, backed up by multiple witnesses: That Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani began pressing Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden, and that after ousting a career diplomat that push became central to the Trump administration’s efforts towards the country, with military aid withheld to pressure Ukraine. Read the full statement here.
— Cameron Joseph
Schiff: “I do not know the identity of the whistleblower”
House Intel Committee Rep. Adam Schiff said he doesn’t know who wrote the original anonymous complaint that got Trump’s big impeachment ball rolling.
Schiff pushed back against what has already emerged as a key anti-impeachment GOP talking point, which is to make dark accusations of anti-Trump bias and cast the impeachment inquiry as some kind of twisted deep state plot helped along by sneaky Democrats.
House Democrats have said the anonymous intelligence whistleblower did reach out to the House Intelligence Committee staff to ask about the procedure for flagging a complaint. But Schiff said plainly today that doesn’t mean he spoke to the person, or knows who he or she is.
Republicans have frequently accused Schiff of being in person contact with the whistleblower, but there’s no real evidence for that claim.“
— Greg Walters
“The low-rent Ukrainian sequel”
Trump’s public impeachment inquiry hearing is underway — and the GOP came out swinging in his defense.
Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, dismissed the proceedings as the freak stepson of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which he likewise described as much ado about nothing.
“This is a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign,” he said, while pointing to Republicans’ lockstep opposition to impeachment as proof that Democrats are operating with partisan bias.
Nunes, who is famous for trying to sue the operator of a spoof Twitter account pretending to be his cow, also accused Democrats of “hypocrisy” and an “impeachment sham.”
— Greg Walters
“I do not believe the U.S. should ask other countries to engage in selective politically associated investigations”
George Kent, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, began his Intel Committee testimony with a brief history lesson about Ukraine’s search for independence. But he soon made one thing clear: that the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy threatened to undermine the decades of progress the country made to stave off Russian aggression.
“As a general principle, I do not believe that the U.S. should ask other countries to engage in selective politically associated investigations, or prosecutions against opponents of those in power,” Kent said of Trump’s infamous request to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Such selective actions undermine the rule of law.”
— Morgan Baskin
Kent: I warned Hunter Biden’s Ukraine gig might look bad
Democrats’ first impeachment witness gave Republicans an opening for one of their preferred lines of attack by mentioning Hunter Biden in a less-than-totally-favorable light.
Kent, repeating previous testimony, said he raised concerns that Hunter’s paid board seat on a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma might look sketchy and raise questions — a fear that proved well-founded years later.
“In a briefing call with the national security staff in the office of the vice president, in February 2015, I raised my concern that Hunter Biden’s status as board member could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” Kent said.
But in the next breath, Kent also pushed back against accusations made without evidence by members of Trump’s circle that former Vice President Joe Biden tried to protect his son from corruption investigations.
The Ukrainian oligarch behind Burisma should have been investigated, Kent said, but nobody on the U.S. side was arguing otherwise.
“I did not witness any efforts by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny,” Kent said. “In fact, I and other U.S. officials consistently advocated reinstituting a scuttled investigation of Zlochevsky, Burisma’s founder, as well as holding the corrupt prosecutors who closed the case to account.”
He essentially said: Yeah, sure, Hunter’s Ukrainian gas gig might not have looked great — but Joe Biden wasn’t out to do anything improper to protect his son.
Joe Biden did help try to push out a Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokhin who has been widely accused of being easy on corrupt businesses and tycoons in Ukraine. In his earlier testimony, Kent blasted Shokhin as someone “very unfavorably known” to the State Department.
— Greg Walters
Cover: Collage by Hunter French | Images via AP
This article originally appeared on VICE US.