NEW EVIDENCE FROM DIPLOMAT
President denies asking for updates on ‘the investigations’ in call
WASHINGTON — A top U.S. diplomat revealed new evidence Wednesday of President Donald Trump’s efforts to press Ukraine to investigate political rivals as House investigators launched public impeachment hearings for just the fourth time in the nation’s history.
William Taylor, the highest-ranking U.S. official in Ukraine, said for the first time that Trump was overheard asking another ambassador about “the investigations” he’d urged Ukraine’s leader to conduct one day earlier. Taylor said he learned of Trump’s phone call with the ambassador in recent days.
It was all part of what Taylor called the “irregular channel,” a shadow foreign policy orchestrated by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, outside traditional oversight that raised alarms in diplomatic and national security circles.
Republicans retorted that the Democrats still have no more than second- and third-hand knowledge of allegations that Trump held up millions of dollars in military aid for the Eastern European nation facing Russian aggression in return for Ukrainian investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.
The hearing, the first on television for the nation to see, provided hours of partisan back-and-forth but so far no singular moment etched in the public
consciousness as grounds for removing the 45th president from office. Trump, who was meeting at the White House with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared he was “too busy” to watch.
The long day of testimony unfolded partly the way Democrats leading the inquiry wanted: in the somber tones of two career foreign service officers who described confusion both within the U.S. government and in Ukraine about what Trump wanted from Kyiv. Taylor testified alongside George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department.
Taylor said his staff recently told him they overheard Trump’s phone call with Ambassador Gordon Sondland at a restaurant the day after Trump’s July 25 phone call with the new leader of Ukraine that sparked the impeachment investigation. The staffer explained that Sondland had called the president and Trump could be heard asking about “the investigations.” Sondland told the president the Ukrainians were ready to move forward, Taylor testified.
Trump denied knowledge of the call later Wednesday, saying, “I know nothing about that.” He added, “First time I’ve heard it.”
An official familiar with the matter said the staffer Taylor referred to is David Holmes, the political counselor at the embassy in Kyiv. Holmes is invited to testify Friday before Congress.
Wednesday’s session unspooled in a formal, columned room on Capitol Hill, detailing the striking yet complicated allegation of a president using foreign policy for personal political gain.
Both sides tried to distill it into sound bites.
Democrats said Trump was engaged in “bribery” and “extortion.” Republicans said nothing really happened: the military aid Trump was withholding from Ukraine while he pushed for the investigations was ultimately released.
At the start of Wednesday’s session, Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, outlined the question at the core of the impeachment inquiry — whether the president abused his office for political gain.
“The matter is as simple and as terrible as that,” said Schiff, D-Calif. “Our answer to these questions will affect not only the future of this presidency but the future of the presidency itself.”
Trump engaged in counterprogramming from the White House, with rapidfire tweets, a video from the Rose Garden and a dismissive retort from the Oval Office as he met with another foreign leader.
The witnesses defied White House instructions not to appear. Both Taylor and Kent received subpoenas.
Both also had told their stories before. They are among a dozen current and former officials who testified behind closed doors. Wednesday signaled the start of at least two weeks of public hearings as the proceedings spill into the open.
A key Trump ally on the panel, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, mockingly called Taylor the Democrats’ “star witness” and said he’d “seen church prayer chains that are easier to understand than this.”
Taylor, a West Point graduate and former Army infantry officer in Vietnam, responded: “I don’t consider myself a star witness for anything.”
The top Republican on the panel, Rep. Devin Nunes of California, said Trump had a “perfectly good reason” for wanting to investigate the role of Democrats in 2016 election interference, giving airtime to a theory that runs counter to mainstream U.S. intelligence, which found that Russia intervened and favored Trump.