Pelosi: What Trump has admitted to is bribery
SPEAKER ACCUSES PRESIDENT OF IMPEACHABLE OFFENCE
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday President Donald Trump already has admitted to bribery in the Ukraine scandal at the heart of a Democratic-led inquiry, accusing him of an impeachable offence under the US Constitution.
“The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation into the elections. That’s bribery,” Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, said. “What the president has admitted to and says it’s ‘perfect,’ I say it’s perfectly wrong. It’s bribery,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi compared Trump’s actions to former President Richard Nixon’s actions in the Watergate corruption scandal that led him in 1974 to become the only US president to resign.
Meanwhile, a second US Embassy staffer in Kyiv overheard a cellphone call between Trump and his ambassador to the EU discussing a need for Ukrainian officials to pursue “investigations,’’ The Associated Press has learned.
The July 26 call between Trump and Gordon Sondland was first described during testimony on Wednesday by William B. Taylor Jr., the acting US ambassador to Ukraine. Taylor said one of his staffers overheard the call while Sondland was in
a Kyiv restaurant the day after Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that triggered the House impeachment inquiry.
The second diplomatic staffer also at the table was Suriya Jayanti, a foreign service officer based in Kyiv. A person briefed on what Jayanti overheard spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. Trump on Wednesday said he did not recall the July 26 call.
The House of Representatives opened historic impeachment hearings on Wednesday and heard a senior American diplomat reveal startling new testimony that drew President Donald Trump closer to the centre of the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a nationally televised hearing, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, brought to life Democrats’ allegations that Trump has abused his office by trying to enlist a foreign power to help him in an election. Taylor testified to the House Intelligence Committee, which is leading the inquiry, that his aide was told in July that Trump cared more about “investigations of Biden” than he did about Ukraine.
The revelation, as Congress embarked on only the third set of presidential impeachment hearings in modern times, tied Trump more directly into what Taylor described in vivid detail as a “highly irregular” effort to place the president’s political interests at the center of American policy toward Ukraine. “I don’t think President Trump was trying to end corruption in Ukraine,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., encapsulating Democrats’ case. “I think he was trying to aim corruption in Ukraine.”
High gear
The proceedings pushed into the public gaze an epic clash between Trump and Democrats over impeachment that has shifted into high gear less than a year before the presidential election. In the first impeachment hearing on Capitol Hill in more than two decades, Taylor and another veteran diplomat, George P. Kent, sketched out, in testimony by turns cinematic and dry, a tale of foreign policymaking distorted by a president’s political vendettas with a small country facing Russian aggression caught in the middle. “If this is not impeachable conduct,” demanded Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the committee, “what is?”
Democrats toiled to make their case to a deeply divided nation that Trump had put the integrity of the 2020 election at risk — by withholding vital security assistance for Ukraine’s war with Russia to try to extract a political advantage for his reelection campaign.