Public hearings Wednesday for Trump impeachment inquiry
- by Lorene Schwartz
- in People
- — Nov 17, 2019
The House impeachment inquiry centers around a phone call Mr. Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, in which he urged Zelensky to investigate potential political opponent Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, while the elder Biden was vice president.
The memo was penned by Republican Party staff on the three House committees spearheading an impeachment inquiry into the president over accusations he would not release military aid to Ukraine without investigations into one of his political rivals, Joe Biden.
"We have another transcript coming out which is very important", Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before leaving for a visit to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The president claimed last week he was considering releasing a transcript of that call, which he said "no one knows about" - despite having discussed it openly with reporters at the United Nations general assembly earlier in the year.
Trump has kept up a steady stream of tweets about what he calls the impeachment "witch hunt". "It's a hoax", he said as he appeared with visiting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by his side.
Schiff says the move comes so that members of the public can listen and "make their own determinations" as to whether the President is guilty of treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors and therefore should be impeached.
After Mueller's appearance on Capitol Hill in July for the end of the Russian Federation probe, the door to impeachment proceedings seemed closed. The White House released a rough transcript of the telephone conversation, with portions deleted.
"Our country is at stake like never before", Trump said in the video.
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Trump wrote on Twitter.
They also want to question Hunter Biden in the hearings but Schiff's comments suggested he would not allow the pair to appear.
Testimony in the closed proceedings shows that the April congratulatory call did not raise concerns, but the tone shifted on the July call that caused alarms among USA officials.
"Total impeachment scam", tweeted the president, as he does virtually every day.
It was all part of what Taylor, the long-serving top diplomat in Ukraine, called the "irregular" foreign policy being led by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, outside of traditional channels.
Both testified behind closed doors of their concerns about the Trump administration's effort to push Ukraine to investigate Democrats. Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her post in the spring, told House investigators that Trump himself was behind a campaign to remove her. They took some guys off television.
Democrats, who initially mulled bringing the whistleblower in with safeguards to mask their identity, have more recently argued that the whistleblower's testimony is unnecessary for their inquiry, given the additional witnesses with knowledge of the call who have corroborated numerous details in the complaint. "They're trying to stop me, because I'm fighting for you".
Eventually the Intelligence Committee will send a report of its findings to the Judiciary Committee, which would decide whether to pursue articles of impeachment against the president. But a trial in the Senate, were it to occur, could stretch until the first presidential votes are cast in February's Iowa caucus.
