Beginning at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning, and likely continuing through the better part of the day, the House Intelligence Committee will begin the first round of public hearings in the ongoing impeachment investigation dealing with President Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals:
Washington (CNN) The gravity and drama of the first televised impeachment hearings into Donald Trump’s presidency on Wednesday will imprint themselves on history and reverberate far from Washington.
The most crucial stage of the Ukraine investigation so far has profound implications beyond the political and personal reputation of Trump and the question of whether he abused his power by seeking political favors from a foreign power.
His fate will have sweeping consequences for the future understanding of powers vested within the presidency itself. The hearings will test whether the ancient machinery of US governance can effectively investigate a President who ignores the charges against him and fogs fact in defining a new post-truth political era. And notwithstanding Trump’s current Republican firewall, the hearings will begin to decide whether a presidency that has rocked America and the world will reach its full natural term.
The fact that there is an impeachment process at all — and a debate over whether the President is so corrupt he should be ousted between elections — is in itself something of a national tragedy. There’s a reason why Gerald Ford called the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 before he was formally impeached, a “long national nightmare.”
The next few months will scar America for years to come. As the Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson impeachments did before it, this process will reflect and intensify the ideological civil war that is tearing at national unity and threatening the nation’s forward momentum.
Democratic leaders, who long resisted demands from their party’s liberal activists to impeach Trump, are taking a considerable risk by embarking on this momentous constitutional road. Given the explosive revelations about Trump’s conduct in Ukraine however, they may have had little political choice.In all likelihood, Republican senators will not vote to convict and oust Trump, opening the possibility of a political backlash, it’s just not clear yet whether Democrats or the GOP would come off worse. Trump is likely to view an eventual escape from censure as a validation of his unrestrained behavior and a license to continue to test constitutional customs.
“I’ve always thought that the strongest argument for impeachment was also the strongest argument against it, which is, if you don’t impeach a president who commits conduct of this kind, what does that say to the next president about what they can do and to the next Congress?” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said in an interview with National Public Radio on Tuesday.
“At the same time, if you do impeach, but the President is acquitted, what does that say to the next president? The next Congress? There’s no good or simple answer,” he said.
Yet for all the bitterness and uncertainty that it stirs, the impeachment process is also a reaffirmation and test of the democratic codes of self-government first set down in Philadelphia nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago.
It will provide the most significant judgment yet on a riotous presidency that has already skipped past one existential scandal in the Russia election meddling scheme.
The Democratic charge that could see Trump shamed as only the third impeached President in history could hardly be more grave. He is effectively accused of committing a crime against the nation itself and the political system that guards its freedoms.
Specifically, Democrats charge Trump with conspiring with a foreign power to influence a US election, an offense many observers believes satisfies the impeachable standard of “Treason, Bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The eventual case may encompass campaign finance offenses, the flouting of his presidential oath to uphold the law and the Constitution and allege obstruction over his withholding of witnesses and evidence. In more symbolic terms, it would validate the fears of America’s founders of one of the greats threats to their democratic experiment.
To force Trump’s removal from office, Democrats must use the hearings beginning on Wednesday to turn independents and moderate Republicans against him.
They hope that the testimony of witnesses including foreign service lifers such as Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Kiev, who opens proceedings on Wednesday, will come across as credible and defang the GOP counterattack. They will portray ousted US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch, who will testify on Friday, as a victim of Trump’s scheme to benefit himself and not US national interests.
They are striving to change the political calculation of GOP senators currently unlikely to desert Trump and build the two-thirds majority to convict him in a Senate trial. Failing that, Trump could be so damaged by impeachment that his hopes of breaking out beyond his base in the 2020 will be doomed.
In essence, Democrats are seeking to build made-for-tv moments that can tell the story of the Ukraine scandal in simple terms — as the Senate Watergate hearings did in the Nixon era.
It is unclear whether they have a witness to match the impact of former White House counsel John Dean who testified that he told Nixon that “there was a cancer growing on the presidency.”
Democrats argue Trump built a sophisticated back-door diplomatic effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter and a conspiracy theory that Kiev and not Russia meddled in the 2016 election. There is no evidence of wrongdoing in Ukraine by either Biden.
Democrats allege that the quid pro quos in this equation involved $400 million in delayed military aid to Ukraine and conditions initially imposed on a White House visit for its President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The rough transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky in July — in which the US leader asked for a “favor” and mentioned Biden — forms the core of the case.
Democrats have also collected evidence that Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was barnstorming around in Europe trying to close the deal with Ukraine and bypassing US diplomats.
“Go talk to Rudy, he knows all about Ukraine,” GOP mega-donor turned US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified that Trump told his subordinates.
Today’s hearing will feature Ambassador Taylor and State Department official George Fox, both of whom were involved in Ukraine policy over the past several years and privy to many of the discussions in which the purported scheme to pressure Kyiv came up. Thanks to the release of the transcripts of their closed-door sessions before the committee, we already have a good idea of what Taylor and Fox will have to say regarding the Ukraine matter and the concerns that they raised regarding the pressure being put on Ukraine’s new President to open an investigation into both Hunter and Joe Biden and into the largely discredited conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered with the 2016 Presidential election despite all the evidence to the contrary. The story that Taylor and Fox appear likely to tell is one that has been corroborated by documentary evidence such a the summary of President’s July 25th phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky as well as the testimony of pretty much every other witness that has gone before the committee so far.
After today, it’s expected that on Friday we’ll hear from former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who among other things testified during her closed-door testimony regarding the extent to which American foreign policy regarding Ukraine was being sidetracked and handed over to a cabal of Trump advisers that includes his private attorney Rudy Giuliani who is, of course, neither a State Department nor a White House employee. Yovanovitch is also expected to testify regarding her own knowledge about the pressure that was put on Ukraine regarding a potential Biden investigation and the extent to which she felt as though she was being forced out of her position by Trump officials who obviously questioned her loyalty given that she is a career foreign diplomat rather than a Trump loyalist. After Yovanovitch, there will be further public hearings next week and in the weeks that follow.
Today’s hearings will be covered live on all of the public broadcasting networks, as well as the cable news networks, and C-Span. It will also be available via a wide variety of streaming services and mobile apps. According to reports, the Democrats are planning on making roughly the first 90 minutes of the heating, after the opening statements from the witnesses, Committee Chairman, and Ranking Member. This is because the principal questioning will be conducted by majority and minority staff counsel and that each side will have 45 uninterrupted minutes each to develop a narrative. This should make the hearings easier to follow than the five-minute back-and-forth we’ve seen in past hearings.
We’ll likely have a wrap-up post on today’s hearings either later today or tomorrow morning depending on how long the day lasts. In the meantime, feel free to turn the comment thread here, as well as today’s Open Forum, into an open thread on the hearing itself.
