WON’T PARTICIPATE IN PUBLIC HEARINGS: TRUMP
IMPEACHMENT REPORT TO BE UNVEILED BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
WASHINGTON: The White House has turned down the House judiciary committee’s invitation to participate in the Wednesday hearing, the first in the penultimate phase of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, but has left open its participation in future proceedings.
The House intelligence committee will review a draft of a report based on its hearings so far, and vote on it on Tuesday to advance to the judiciary committee, for it to determine the articles of impeachment and put them to a vote by the full House. A Senate trial will be the final stage.
The judiciary committee is scheduled to hold its first hearing on Wednesday at which it will discuss constitutional provisions and procedures regarding impeachment with academics and experts as witnesses. The committee had invited Trump to either participate or send his counsel to the hearing.
In a five-page letter sent to committee chairman Gerold Nadler, White House counsel Pat Cipollone said the Trump administration will not participate in the hearing, saying an “invitation to an academic discussion with law professors does not begin to provide the president with any semblance of a fair process. Under the current circumstances, we do not intend to participate in the Wednesday hearing.”
The administration will respond separately to another invitation to participate before a December 6 deadline. But the White House counsel asked if the Democratic-led committee will allow Republicans to choose the witnesses and if Trump’s counsel will be allowed to cross-examine fact-witnesses, even those who had testified earlier. There has been no response from Nadler’s office.
The probe revolves around the Trump administration’s efforts to force Ukraine to investigate the president’s political rival, former vice president Joe Biden, by both withholding security aid of nearly $400 million and offering Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky a status-boosting White House meeting. Trump weighed in himself in a series in tweets on Monday. In one of them, he cited Zelensky’s assertion in a new interview that there was “no quid pro quo”, to bolster his own repeated claims to that effect.
But he ignored portions of the interview in which the Ukrainian president was critical of the Trump administration withholding aid. “We’re at war,” Zelensky said. “If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us. I think that’s just about fairness.”