Things We Learned from the First Public Impeachment Hearing
WASHINGTON — There were no gut punches at House Intelligence Committee’s first public hearing of impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and a right-wing conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. But that doesn’t mean the hearing, the first of several, was a dud.
Quite the contrary. Witnesses George Kent, a State Department deputy assistant secretary overseeing European and Eurasian affairs, and Bill Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, affirmed many details of what we know about the months-long push by Rudy Giuliani and his cronies to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens. Kent and Taylor also gave compelling testimony about why this shadow campaign was so at odds with America’s official foreign policy and the real danger faced by Ukrainians while the U.S. president effectively extorted the new Ukrainian president into doing his bidding.
Here are four things we learned from Wednesday’s hearing.
Trump put American and Ukrainian national security at risk with his extortion plot aimed at the new Ukrainian president. Kent and Taylor were not direct participants in the plot to pressure the Ukrainians to announce a Biden investigation, but as longtime diplomats and Ukraine experts, they spoke in great detail about how beyond the pale and troubling the Trump-Ukraine scheme was.
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Trump cares more about Ukraine investigating Biden than anything else in that country. There was one new revelation to come out of Taylor and Kent’s testimony: In his opening statement, Taylor testified one of his staffers accompanied Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the E.U., to a restaurant in Kyiv on the day of the July 25th call when Trump asked Ukrainian President Zelensky for the “favor” of investigating the Bidens. According to Taylor’s staffer, Sondland took a call from Trump in the restaurant. Sondland told Trump about his meetings in Kyiv, and Trump asked about “the investigations.”
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Despite what Republicans say, the Ukrainians were freaked out by Trump freezing their security funds. At this point, a popular talking point among House Republicans and Trump allies is that there couldn’t have been a quid pro quo or abuse of power because the Ukrainians weren’t upset or even aware that the Trump administration had put a hold on the $400 million in U.S. aid. They point to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s friendly attitude on the July 25th call with Trump or the fact that they didn’t raise the issue in multiple meetings across the summer of 2019.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/first-public-impeachment-hearing-trump-ukraine-biden-911935/
