GOP protest disrupts inquiry
Standoff comes as evidence grows of pressure on Ukraine
WASHINGTON — House Republicans ground the impeachment inquiry to a halt for hours Wednesday, staging an attention-grabbing protest at the Capitol that sowed chaos and delayed a deposition as they sought to insulate President Donald Trump against mounting evidence of misconduct.
Chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” about two dozen Republican lawmakers — most of whom are not on the committees conducting the inquiry and are therefore not entitled to attend their hearings — pushed past Capitol Police officers to enter the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, which is leading the investigation. Republicans who are on the committees have been in on the hearings from the start and have had the chance to hear from all the witnesses.
Some of the Republicans brought their cellphones into the secure room, which is not permitted and considered a security breach. The sergeant-at-arms, the top law enforcement officer in the Capitol, was called in to handle the situation as Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, attempted to intervene.
After several contentious hours marked by shouting matches between Republican and Democratic lawmakers and an appearance
by the sergeant-at-arms, the top law enforcement official in the Capitol, Wednesday’s witness began testifying. Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, answered questions for more than three hours before the panel wrapped up its work for the day.
The standoff came the day after the explosive testimony of William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, who effectively confirmed Democrats’ main accusation against Trump: that the president withheld military aid from Ukraine in a quid pro quo effort to pressure that country’s leader to incriminate former Vice President Joe Biden and smear other Democrats.
Freezing of aid
To Democrats who say that Trump’s decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine was intended to bully Ukraine’s leader into carrying out investigations for Trump’s political benefit, the president and his allies have had a simple response: There could not have been any quid pro quo because the Ukrainians did not know the assistance had been blocked.
Following Taylor’s testimony that the freezing of the aid was directly linked to Trump’s demand for the investigations, the president took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to approvingly quote a Republican member of Congress saying neither Taylor nor any other witness had “provided testimony that the Ukrainians were aware that military aid was being withheld.”
But word of the aid freeze had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August, according to interviews and documents obtained by the New York Times.
The problem was not a bureaucratic glitch, the Ukrainians were told then. To address it, they were advised, they should reach out to Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, according to the interviews and records.
The timing of the communications about the issue, which have not previously been reported, shows that Ukraine was aware the White House was holding up the funds weeks earlier than U.S. and Ukrainian officials had acknowledged. And it means that the Ukrainian government was aware of the freeze during most of the period in August when Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and two American diplomats were pressing President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to make a public commitment to the investigations being sought by Trump.
The communications did not explicitly link the assistance freeze to the push by Trump and Giuliani for the investigations. But in the communications, officials from the United States and Ukraine discuss the need to bring in the same senior aide to Zelenskiy who had been dealing with Giuliani about Trump’s demands for the investigations, signaling a possible link between the matters.
Taylor testified to the impeachment investigators that he was told it was only on the sidelines of a Sept. 1 meeting in Warsaw between Zelenskiy and Vice President Mike Pence that the Ukrainians were directly informed by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that the aid would be dependent on Zelenskiy giving Trump something he wanted: an investigation into Burisma, the company that had employed Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.
American and Ukrainian officials have asserted that Ukraine learned that the aid had been held up only around the time it became public through a news story at the end of August.
The disclosure that the Ukrainians knew of the freeze by early August corroborates, and provides additional details about, a claim made by a CIA officer in his whistleblower complaint that sparked the impeachment inquiry by House Democrats.
May meeting
Additionally, the Associated Press reported that more than two months before the July 25 phone call that launched the impeachment inquiry, Ukraine’s newly elected leader was already worried about pressure from the U.S. president to investigate Biden.
Zelenskiy gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kiev for a meeting that was supposed to be about his nation’s energy needs. Instead, the group spent most of the threehour discussion talking about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and Giuliani for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the meeting.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.
The meeting came before Zelenskiy was inaugurated but about two weeks after Trump called to offer his congratulations on the night of the Ukrainian leader’s
April 21 election.
The full details of what the two leaders discussed in that Easter Sunday phone call have never been publicly disclosed, and it is not clear whether Trump explicitly asked for an investigation of the Bidens.
The AP reported that the three people’s recollections differ on whether Zelenskiy specifically cited that first call with Trump as the source of his unease. But their accounts all show the Ukrainian president-elect was wary of Trump’s push for an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter’s business dealings.
More records demanded
After Wednesday’s protest by Republicans, Trump took to Twitter to assail Taylor and his lawyer John Bellinger.
“Never Trumper Republican John Bellinger, represents Never Trumper Diplomat Bill Taylor (who I don’t know), in testimony before Congress!” the president wrote. “Do Nothing Democrats allow Republicans Zero Representation, Zero due process, and Zero Transparency.”
For weeks now, lawmakers on three House committees — Intelligence, Oversight and Reform, and Foreign Affairs — have been conducting private question-and-answer sessions, which have produced a stream of compelling testimony from government witnesses, much of it confirming and expanding on the intelligence whistleblower complaint that touched off the impeachment inquiry.
Those sessions are attended by both Democrats and Republicans, and both have an opportunity to question witnesses; more than 100 of the 435 members of the House are eligible to participate. Democrats have said that they plan to hold open hearings after the committees finish deposing witnesses and that they intend to make public complete transcripts of witness testimony after they have been reviewed for classified material.
Also Wednesday, House impeachment investigators leveled new demands of the State Department, requesting access to communications, notes and memorandums related to U.S. policy toward Ukraine that could bolster damning witness testimony. Among the documents in question are summaries of key executive branch meetings; diplomatic cables about Trump’s decision to freeze $391 million in security assistance for Ukraine; text and email messages among key figures in the inquiry.