GOP’s witness wish list spurned
Neither whistleblower nor Biden will publicly testify at probe, Dems say
With the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump poised to enter a public phase, lawmakers on Sunday sparred over the witnesses who will be allowed to testify.
Democrats dismissed Republican efforts to call the anonymous whistleblower and former vice-president Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, raised the issue of the “great risk associated with (the whistleblower’s) life right now.” She also said that it is unnecessary for the individual to appear before the intelligence panel because other witnesses who were actually on Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — which is at the centre of the inquiry — will testify.
“The only thing that the whistleblower can say is that he was told by other people about the phone call,” Speier said. “We have the other people coming forward to actually testify. So you have direct evidence, not indirect evidence.”
Speier argued that having Hunter Biden testify would also be “irrelevant” because he “is unrelated to the Ukraine call.” Some of the witnesses Republicans have requested may be allowed, she added, including National Security Council official Tim Morrison and former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, both of whom have already testified behind closed doors.
Another Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New
York, also rejected the call for Hunter Biden to testify.
“He has no knowledge of what the president did or didn’t do here that is the subject of the impeachment hearing,” Maloney said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Republicans have sought to minimize Trump’s role in the campaign to pressure Ukraine, and the list of potential witnesses they released Saturday suggests they will continue to do so.
Among those on the list are Hunter Biden, whose father is a leading Democratic candidate to challenge Trump in 2020; Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer; the unnamed whistleblower, whom Trump and some of his allies have campaigned to publicly identify; the researcher Nellie Ohr of Fusion GPS, which commissioned a dossier that linked Russia and Trump; and Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian
American who worked with the Democratic National Committee.
House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a statement Saturday that Democrats would evaluate the requests but that the impeachment probe “will not serve … as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations” into the Bidens or the 2016 campaign, or to retaliate against the whistleblower.
Several Republicans on the Sunday morning news shows focused on the process of the impeachment inquiry rather than on the substance of the allegations against Trump.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, argued on “This Week” that “there will be a taint to this onesided, partisan approach to impeachment.”
He said it would be “inappropriate,” but not impeachable, for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political rival, as Trump is alleged to have done. The importance of process, Thornberry maintained, cannot be ignored.
“There’s a reason we let murderers and robbers and rapists go free when their due process rights have been violated,” Thornberry said.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said the impeachment inquiry “has been a partisan exercise from the very beginning.” He said Republicans want to hear testimony from Hunter Biden.
Hurd also argued that Schiff should be forced to testify about his office’s contacts with the whistleblower, claiming that the committee chair “misled the American public earlier in the year about what he knew about the contact with the whistleblower.”