After nearly two months of investigations that have mostly unfolded behind closed doors, the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is going public.
On Wednesday, millions of Americans will hear for the first time directly from witnesses about Trump’s alleged attempts to use foreign aid to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation into a political rival. The impeachment probe is examining whether the President abused the power of his office for his political gain.
The first witnesses that House Democrats will bring on stage are two career diplomats: William Taylor, who serves the U.S. charges d’affaires in Kyiv, and George Kent, a top U.S. State Department official with decades of experience in Ukraine policy. They will appear together before the House Intelligence Committee. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump recalled to Washington in May, is expected to appear before the committee on Friday.
Since the lawmakers on the committee have already heard from Taylor, Kent, and Yovanovitch, the public hearings this week are intended to present their testimony to the public on live television. Ken Hughes, a research specialist at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center with expertise in Watergate and presidential abuses of power, said the importance of public hearings should not be underestimated. “The attention of voters and citizens will finally be focused on these particular set of facts—what the president did and when, how his own aides witnessed or learned about these activities,” said Hughes. “It will give the public an opportunity to size up these witnesses for themselves.”
Democrats expect Taylor and Kent to largely restate parts of their closed-door testimony. Both officials helped explain what Trump meant when he now-infamously told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 phone call, “I would like you to do us a favor.” Both officials expressed alarm that Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani were subverting normal diplomatic channels in order to push a foreign power to announce an investigation that would benefit Trump politically.
“We want the American people to hear the evidence for themselves in the witnesses’ own words, and our goal is to present the facts in a serious and sober manner,” Rep. Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “The three witnesses this week will begin to flesh out the details of the president’s effort to coerce a foreign nation to engage in political investigations designed to help his campaign, a corrupt undertaking that is evident from his own words on the July 25 call record.”
Next week, eight more U.S. officials will testify publicly before the committee, according to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence; Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the director for European Affairs at the National Security Council; Ambassador Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine; and Tim Morrison, a National Security Council aide will testify on Nov. 19. U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Eurasian Affairs Laura Cooper, and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale will testify Nov. 20. Former National Security Council Senior Director Fiona Hill will testify on Nov. 21.
House Democrats’ decision to lead off the hearings with Taylor and Kent, two non-political career diplomats, is intended in part to underscore a message that Trump’s actions transcend partisan politics and warrant broad concern among foreign service officers. Taylor and Kent are two of fifteen current and former U.S. officials who testified before the House in private. Many were career diplomats and mid-level government officials who never expected to become household names. Their testimony was strengthened by skills born of years of government work: meticulous contemporaneous notes, records and memos.
According to hundreds of pages of closed-door testimonies reviewed by TIME, these current and former government officials were blunt in their characterization of the Trump team’s unorthodox actions. Democrats hope that by televising these statements, given under oath, Americans will better grasp the extent to which Trump appeared to be conducting U.S. foreign policy outside normal channels and for his own political ends. In his closed-door testimony, Taylor called the shadow diplomacy by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani “crazy” and “weird.” Kent reported hearing that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to a microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton.”
“The two of them saw the full scope and timeline of the president’s misconduct but sat in different positions so I think it will be an interesting story to have them both told side by side,” said one Democratic aide. “It will really set the stage for the public to understand the full storyline.”
Democrats hope Taylor’s credentials in particular will make him a compelling and credible witness. Taylor is a nonpolitical career diplomat and Vietnam veteran who previously served as ambassador to Ukraine. When he testified behind closed doors on Oct. 23, Taylor provided significant details that tied Trump directly to efforts to make military aid to Ukraine contingent on the country opening investigations that he sought for his own political gain. Taylor told investigators that it was made clear to him that the White House would continue to withhold the aid, which had already been approved by Congress, until Ukrainian officials publicly announced that they were opening probes into Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and into unsubstantiated allegations of Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in the 2016 election.
Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security secretary, called the president’s insistence that Ukraine intervened on behalf of Democrats in the 2016 election “not only a conspiracy theory” but “completely debunked.”
Republicans will likely dismiss details of the months-long campaign to pressure Ukraine, arguing that Trump’s sole motive was to root out corruption in the former Soviet satellite state. “Democrats want to impeach Donald Trump because unelected and anonymous bureaucrats disagreed with President Trump’s decisions and were discomforted by his telephone conversation with President Zelensky,” House Republicans wrote in a memo circulated to lawmakers Monday evening and obtained by TIME. “The Democrat impeachment narrative flips our system of government on its head.”
These public hearings come after weeks of complaints by Republicans, who have criticized Democrats for holding secret hearings. Last week, a group of Republican lawmakers stormed the secure room where House investigators, including Republicans and Democrats, were holding hearings, triggering a dramatic, made-for-television confrontation.
Democrats expect Taylor to repeat several statements he made in the closed-door hearing, in which he remembered in “excruciating detail” the “irregular, informal channels” that had been used by Giuliani to pressure Ukraine.
Taylor’s public testimony may also strengthen Democrats’ case because his detailed description illustrates how Trump’s decision to withhold aid went against U.S. national security interests. The transcript of the almost 10-hour hearing, which spans 324 pages, shows him to be a fierce critic of blocking the U.S. military aid to Ukraine, which the country needed to confront Russia. He describes being on the front line of the conflict against Russia-backed separatists, which has killed 13,000 Ukrainians, and being acutely aware that “more Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. military assistance.”
“The commander thanked us for security assistance, but I was aware that this assistance was on hold, which made me uncomfortable,” Taylor said.
According to his closed-door testimony, Kent, the other witness on Wednesday, will provide similarly serious details. But he is expected to offer a different opening statement than the one he presented at the closed hearing, Kent’s lawyer told TIME. Like Taylor, Kent’s deep experience in U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine means he was keenly aware of the ways in which it was subverted by Trump and Giuliani. In his testimony, for example, he describes how Giuliani waged a “campaign of lies” about then-Ambassador Yovanovitch after he deemed her to be obstructing his efforts to get Ukraine to announce the investigation into the Bidens and Democrats, according to the transcript.
Republicans may attempt to refocus the hearings by questioning Kent about his decision, in 2015, to express concerns about Hunter Biden serving on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Kent informed then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office of his concerns, he told lawmakers in his testimony, but was told that there was no capacity to deal with it because Hunter’s brother Beau was dying of terminal cancer.
In a memo to members of the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Schiff included a lengthy section emphasizing the importance of protecting the whistleblower’s identity, an issue that has become a heated point of contention during the closed-door hearings. During the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, Republicans repeatedly pressed him on who he spoke with about his concerns. Democrats and Vindman’s lawyer accused them of trying to reveal the whistleblower’s identity.
“I’ve never seen either party ever try to out a whistleblower in the same concerted way that is going on in here,” Michael Volkov, Vindman’s lawyer, told lawmakers according to the transcript.
With reporting by Tessa Berenson / Washington
https://ift.tt/2qbyQxl
Vera Bergengruen and Alana Abramson
November 12, 2019 at 04:51PM
No comments:
Post a Comment