Hearings go public
House Democrats open doors as impeachment witnesses will testify on TV beginning today
House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump has involved three committees collecting testimony from behind closed doors from diplomats and national security officials.
This week, the first public witnesses will bear testimony. The three scheduled to testify are Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine after Trump removed the ambassador; George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasia affairs; and Marie Yovanovitch, the ambassador who was removed.
Highlights of their closed-door testimony have already been reported from transcripts, but the hearings will put the story before a national television audience.
WASHINGTON – State Department officials who questioned President Donald Trump’s effort to require Ukraine to investigate his political rival – and an ambassador who was removed to clear the path for his back-channel diplomacy – are the first public witnesses in Week 8 of the House’s Democratic impeachment inquiry.
The House Intelligence Committee is holding its first public hearings after three panels, including Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform, spent weeks collecting testimony behind closed doors from diplomats and national security officials.
Three of those witnesses will now describe how they criticized the policy; how the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, guided the back-channel effort; and how Trump recalled the ambassador to Ukraine to make way for the effort. Highlights of testimony from Bill Taylor, George Kent and Marie Yovanovitch have already been reported from transcripts, but the hearings will put the story before a national TV audience.
The inquiry is built upon Trump’s July 25 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which he urged the investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden while withholding nearly $400 million in military aid.
Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine after Trump removed the ambassador, described two channels of diplodescribed macy: one for the State Department and one for Giuliani. Taylor said he learned slowly from May through July about the insistence on an investigation and the withholding of aid.
“I and the others on the call sat in astonishment,” Taylor said of a July 18 call when the holdup in military aid was announced. “The Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support.”
Taylor called the trade-off of an investigation for military aid “crazy” in a Sept. 9 text to Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Taylor threatened to quit if the U.S. was no longer strongly supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasia affairs, Giuliani’s role in guiding the policy and driving criticism of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch. He described how Giuliani ran a “campaign of slander” against Yovanovitch March 20-23 through television appearances, newspaper articles and Giuliani’s Twitter feed.
“It was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” Kent said.
Yovanovitch, a career foreign-service officer, recounted an April 25 incident when she was told she had to “be on the next plane home to Washington,” a departure so abrupt she worried about having time to pack.
She asked for support against the attacks against her and the U.S. Embassy in conservative media, but none came from the State Department.