Public hearings begin in Trump impeachment inquiry

Sen. Lamar Alexander’s decision to oppose witnesses in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial seems like the nail in the coffin. Without Alexander’s vote, Democrats have virtually no shot at winning enough support to call vitally important figures like former White House national security adviser John Bolton to the Senate floor to testify about Trump’s threats to withhold military aid from Ukraine.

Alexander’s justification for his vote is remarkable. He argues that there is “no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens” because ‘the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.’”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (AK) said she was “disturbed” when she heard Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comments that he plans to work closely with White House attorneys during the Senate’s upcoming impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

Murkowski expressed her concern while speaking with Alaskan news station KTUU Tuesday. “When I heard that, I was disturbed,” Murkowski said of McConnell’s comments, which he made to Fox News. “To me it means that we have to take that step back from being hand in glove with the defense, and so I heard what leader McConnell had said, I happened to think that that has further confused the process.”

During a moment in which President Donald Trump appears to be days from being impeached, his personal lawyer is boldly promoting more of the sort of conspiracy theories around the Biden family and Ukraine that has led the president into impeachment proceedings in the first place.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, gave an interview with the conservative One America News Network (OAN) that aired Saturday and Sunday, in which he pushed increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories about the Biden family and Ukraine.

The House Judiciary Committee voted to approve two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump Friday — paving the way for votes in the full House of Representatives next week that could make Trump only the third president in history to be impeached.

Both articles — the first charging Trump with abuse of power, and the second charging him with obstruction of Congress — were approved by the committee on party-line votes, with all 23 Democrats voting in favor and all 17 Republicans voting against (Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) missed the vote because he was recovering from a heart procedure).

Republicans haven’t used the impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump to question the underlying facts of the case Democrats are making against him. Instead, they’ve gone all in for Trump, echoing conspiracy theories and pushing alternative narratives for conservative media to consume.

Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee ranking member from California, spent most of his time at the November 13 hearing railing against the media. “Anyone familiar with the Democrats’ scorched-earth war against President Trump,” he said, “would not be surprised to see all the typical signs that this is just a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign.”

Hours after she announced that House Democrats will draft articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a news conference that ended on a remarkably contentious note.

As she walked away from the podium, Pelosi was asked by James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcast Group if she is moving forward with impeachment because she has personal animus for Trump.

The Ukraine scandal has a lot of complicated parts. During Thursday afternoon’s impeachment hearings, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill clearly laid out one of the most devastating: that the Trump administration systematically undermined the normal US diplomatic process to pursue a shadow foreign policy in service of what she described as a “domestic political errand.”

Steve Castor, the attorney for House Republicans, began the exchange (which he now probably regrets) by asking Hill about some unpleasant conversations she had with Gordon Sondland, Trump’s EU ambassador, about his involvement in Ukraine policy. Sondland was, as he testified Wednesday, deeply involved in Trump’s push to pressure the Ukrainians into investigating conspiracy theories around the 2016 election and Burisma (the Ukrainian gas company Hunter Biden sat on the board of).

The House is pushing ahead with its public impeachment hearings this week. And with at least nine witnesses set to testify, it’s going to be an intense one.

Three people will appear on Wednesday, including the most anticipated witness of these hearings so far, US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. In the text of his opening statement, Sondland writes he “came to believe” the White House would hold up military aid until Ukraine agreed to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s time on the board of the energy company, Burisma. Sondland writes he was concerned about a “quid pro quo.”

During an impeachment hearing Tuesday, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes praised the reporting of a “veteran investigative journalist” whose work had proven to be a “problem for the Democrats” and the media.

That journalist is John Solomon, formerly of the Hill and currently a Fox News contributor. Republicans like Nunes have relied on Solomon’s work during the impeachment inquiry to build the case that Trump was right to be concerned about former Vice President Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine and those of his son, Hunter Biden, and to argue that the “real” scandal is how the Obama administration tried to get the Ukrainian government to cover up corruption.

A former top White House official just outlined a quid pro more clearly than any other witness in the public impeachment hearings so far — and it’s devastating to Republicans’ defense of President Donald Trump.

Under questioning from Democrats, Tim Morrison, the former top National Security Council official for Russia and European affairs, was asked to recall a September 1 conversation between US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Ukraine official Andriy Yermak. That discussion has become central to the question of whether US military assistance to Kyiv was conditioned upon Ukraine opening investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden’s family and other Democrats.

When House Intelligence Committee Democrats offered Republicans the opportunity to suggest impeachment inquiry witnesses, Kurt Volker — the former US special representative to Ukraine — made the list.

And yet in his opening statement Tuesday, Volker made a number of points that seemed quite bad for the case President Donald Trump’s defenders are trying to build.

Four witnesses were called to testify on the third day of public hearings into the House impeachment inquiry. Of the four, Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer and a US Army lieutenant colonel, was the only witness to come in full military garb — an outfit that placed Vindman’s military career on full display.

It’s standard practice for military officers testifying on Capitol Hill, but the dress uniform became a flashpoint on Tuesday.

House impeachment investigators are probing whether President Donald Trump, or anyone in his inner circle, directed the president’s former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, to press Ukrainian senior officials to shut down a criminal investigation of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, according to sources close to the impeachment inquiry and committee records.

If House investigators are able to uncover evidence that Trump — or anyone close to him — directed Volker to shut down the legitimate investigation of a former head of state as conducted by a sovereign foreign nation, that might constitute a new abuse of power to be included in the articles of impeachment that Democrats are looking to bring against Trump, said one of the sources.

The most dramatic moment of former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s appearance before the House impeachment inquiry on Friday actually happened outside the Congressional chamber.

Just one hour into the hearing, President Donald Trump tweeted an attack against the 33-year career foreign service officer, claiming that everywhere she went “turned bad.” That insult led House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) to characterize the president’s comments as a form of witness intimidation.

When Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, testified on Capitol Hill Friday morning during the second day of impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump, it didn’t take the president long to send a tweet attacking her.

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Trump wrote. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. it is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch delivered a powerful opening statement during her testimony before House impeachment investigators on Friday. She detailed her decades of service as a diplomat, and expressed concern that her sudden ouster due to a Trumpworld smear campaign this past spring could have a chilling effect on those who are sincerely committed to rooting out corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere.

“I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong,” she said, alluding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “The policy process is visibly unraveling ... the State Department is being hollowed out.”

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, is on Capitol Hill Friday to testify in the second day of public impeachment hearings. But she used her opening testimony in large part to offer a stinging indictment of leadership at the State Department under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Donald Trump.

Yovanovitch was the US ambassador to Ukraine between August 2016 and May of this year. A widely respected career diplomat and the highest-ranked female ambassador at the State Department, Yovanovitch was the target of Rudy Giuliani-led attacks falsely accusing her of, among other things, working to thwart Trump’s Ukraine policy and being close to the previous Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko. That smear campaign, backed with no public evidence, ultimately led to her unceremonious dismissal months before her time was up.

House Democrats’ second public hearing in their impeachment inquiry kicks off at 9 am ET on Friday, featuring the testimony of former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. You can watch the hearing on CSPAN or other major networks, and a live stream is embedded above.

After hearing from witnesses who had a front-row seat to Trump officials’ attempts to pressure Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky this summer, Friday’s hearing will take a step back chronologically, to an earlier point in this saga.