Impeachment Today: Trumplicans Desperate as Dems Ready for Broadcast Open Hearings
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, “1984”
Wednesday, October 2, 2019 will go down in history as the day an impeachment trial became a certainty, thanks to two major developments.
The deposition phase of the House inquiry will move on to be a more public affair as documents and witness testimony are revealed. TV drama, vis a vis open hearings, will change the dynamics and public perception of what’s going on.
The top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council gave a first hand account of the July phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. What he heard led him to raise an internal alarm that US foreign policy was being subverted.
Let’s break these development down.
Made for TV…
The House rules committee convened today to draft a resolution laying out the course of the impeachment inquiry moving forward, including a timeline for moving the investigation from closed-door depositions to public hearings.
Passage of this resolution will accelerate the impeachment process . It will establish a procedure “for hearings that are open to the American people”, authorize the disclosure of deposition transcripts, outline procedures to transfer evidence to the judiciary committee as it considers potential articles of impeachment, and set forth due process rights for the president and his counsel, according to a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The House Intelligence Committee will take the lead, holding public hearings with key witnesses, such as Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union; Fiona Hill, a former top White House adviser; and William Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine.
This move toward public hearings takes the wind out of the sails for Republican “process” complaints. They know it, and are busy moving the goalposts. Next up will be the denigration of the House of Representatives as currently constituted, using the words “tainted” and “sham.”.
Here’s Laura Clawson at Daily Kos:
“Pelosi let Schiff hold secret hearings and leak misleading info to attack @realDonaldTrump for weeks. Now she wants a vote to ‘formalize’ a process that’s already tainted. Dems aren't trying to change their Soviet-style impeachment process, they're formally endorsing it,” whined House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. Like basically every argument Republicans have made on this, this is downright hilarious when you consider the current inquiry in comparison to the secret, leak-prone Benghazi investigation into Hillary Clinton.
Look to hear the word “tainted” a lot in the next few days, since Rep. Andy Biggs used the same term, suggesting that it’s part of Republican Talking Points Mad Libs. They lost the House in 2018, so to them anything coming from the House will be tainted. “Tainted,” coming from these guys, just means “Republicans didn’t control it.” Also expect to hear “sham,” already used by Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mark Meadows. Gaetz’s take was especially creative, calling House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff’s inquiry “freewheeling” and “anarchic.” Which, please. We have all seen Adam Schiff on television and we can all tell that nothing that man does will ever be freewheeling or anarchic.
Putting the Intelligence Committee at the lead for further inquiries is a good strategic move.
From Politico:
Further complicating the (Republican) party’s strategy, some of Trump’s fiercest attack dogs will be sidelined when Democrats take their impeachment inquiry public: The Democrats’ resolution is expected to put the House Intelligence Committee in charge of the public impeachment hearings, as opposed to the other panels that have been involved in the depositions.
That means Meadows, Jordan and Zeldin, who have participated in the vast majority of the depositions and have often led news conferences with reporters afterward, will be shut out from the high-profile public hearings that they have been gearing up for.
Instead, Trump’s public defense will be left in the hands of the nine Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee — the fewest number of GOP lawmakers to push back against the impeachment inquiry.
One of Trump’s ardent defenders, Rep. Devin Nunes, is on the intelligence committee. And it would seem as though his office is at the bottom of some nefarious dealings concerning the identity of the original whistleblower.
The Daily Beast reports that Nune’s aide Derek Harvey has been passing along information to conservative journalists, hoping for coverage revealing the name of the person who filed the original complaint against the White House.
The whistleblower is not Harvey’s only target. Another is a staffer for the House intelligence committee Democrats whom The Daily Beast has agreed not to name due to concerns about reprisals against the staffer. Harvey, both sources said, has spread a false story alleging that the whistleblower contacted the staffer ahead of raising internal alarm about President Trump’s July 25 phone call attempting to get a “favor” from Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to damage Trump’s rival Joe Biden. In right-wing circles, contact with Schiff is meant to discredit the whistleblower as partisan.
The eagerness of Republicans to go after the intelligence committee staffer so alarmed Democrats that they raised the issue with GOP leadership, according to a senior official on the intelligence committee.
***
Today’s testimony by Lieutenant Colonel Vindman is significant for a number of reasons, including the fact that he is the first White House official to defy orders not to cooperate.
As part of his duties with the National Security Council, Vindman listened in on Trump’s phone call with Zelensky . This means he’ll be ending the “hearsay” narrative pushed by the White House, as he’ll provide a firsthand account of what House Democrats have said is a blatant abuse of power by the president.
His opening statement to the committee leaned heavily on his military service and a “sense of duty” to his country, via Politico.
“I am a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to advance and defend our country, irrespective of party or politics,” Vindman wrote in his opening statement, adding that his family fled the Soviet Union when he was just 3½ years old. Vindman was also wounded in an IED attack while serving in Iraq and later received a Purple Heart.
“As an active duty military officer, the command structure is extremely important to me,” Vindman said, defending his decisions to express his concerns about Trump to his higher-ups. “On many occasions I have been told I should express my views and share my concerns with my chain of command and proper authorities.”
Ahead of Vindman’s testimony, Trump railed against the senior official on Twitter, calling him a “Never Trumper” and saying he “never even heard of” Vindman.
One other person reacted to the prospect of Vindman’s testimony, namely EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who returned to Capitol HIll on Monday to revise his testimony.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he is now admitting the existence of a quid pro quo, something he denied last week.
Here’s the gist of Vindman’s testimony, via Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:
Vindman also spoke directly to Ambassador Gordon Sondland to complain about Sondland’s efforts to force a visiting Ukrainian official into providing political dirt in exchange for U.S. assistance. The incident with Sondland, which took place two weeks before Trump’s phone call, included the ambassador emphasizing “the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma.” Vindman will testify that he spoke to Sondland following that meeting to tell him that the “statements were inappropriate” and that “the request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security.” Vindman took these complains both to White House adviser Fiona Hill and to the lead counsel for the National Security Council.
By this point, the testimony delivered to the inquiry brings up the question: Did Gordon Sondland realize the House impeachment inquiry was going to actually talk to other people? Because his testimony seems not just in doubt, but absolutely riddled with issues that absolutely reach the level of perjury.
But there is one other person who loses big from Vindman’s testimony: Donald Trump. Vindman is not the whistleblower, and he’s not a member of the State Department worried about the nuances of diplomatic contacts. He’s a serving military officer whose concerns are directly connected to national security, and he’s a direct witness to both the phone call and the way Ukrainian officials were treated in the White House.
Team Trump responded to news of this impending with I’d call shameless character assassination.
https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1189209808865333248?s=20
Via Huffington Post:
But people on Fox News are already questioning his loyalty and patriotism. Laura Ingraham noted the Times story reported that Vindman emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine as a child and that Ukrainian officials asked him in English for advice on dealing with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. She then accused Vindman of working “apparently against the president’s interests” while inside the White House.
“Isn’t that kind of an interesting angle on the story?” the conservative personality asked guest John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped write the infamous “torture memos” during the George W. Bush presidency.
Yoo said it went far beyond “interesting.”
“I find that astounding,” he said. “Some people might call that espionage.”
https://twitter.com/Stonekettle/status/1189188911211241474?s=20
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