Trump’s impeachment hearings
Compiled from New Yorker Magazine
The Current
New Yorker writers respond to the news.
“We Followed the President’s Orders”: Gordon Sondland’s Testimony Likely Assures Trump’s Impeachment
The U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, delivered testimony on Wednesday that all but assured President Trump’s impeachment. Sondland explained that he and other senior officials worked with the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, “at the express direction of the President of the United States” to secure an investigation of President Trump’s potential political rival Joe Biden, in exchange for American military aid and a White House visit. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we were playing the hand we were dealt,” he testified. “We followed the President’s orders.”
Sondland said the efforts were known to Vice-President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the former national-security adviser John Bolton, and other senior members of the Administration. He testified that Giuliani “was expressing the desire of the President of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the President.” Sondland read aloud from e-mails that he said confirmed that State Department officials and senior officials in the White House were “all informed about the Ukraine efforts” and that “everyone was in the loop.”
For weeks, Democrats have sought to prove that Trump explicitly conditioned the White House visit and aid on the announcement of a Biden investigation. Sondland left no doubt of that. “I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’ ” Sondland said. “As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.”
Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, immediately signalled that Sondland’s statement described impeachable offenses. “If the President abused his power and invited foreign interference in our elections, if he sought to condition, coerce, extort, or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his reëlection campaign, and did so by withholding official acts, a White House meeting, or hundreds of millions of dollars of needed military aid,” Schiff said, “it will be up to us to decide whether those acts are compatible with the office of the Presidency.”
Sondland’s testimony also raised the possibility of an article of impeachment regarding obstruction of justice. Sondland said he had not had access to “all of my phone records, State Department e-mails, and other State Department documents” that would have helped him in preparing his testimony. “These documents are not classified,” Sondland said. “They should have been made available.”
Schiff then issued a direct warning to Trump that framed the withholding of State Department documents as comparable to the acts of obstruction that helped bring down President Richard Nixon.“We can see why Secretary Pompeo and President Trump have made such a concerted and across-the-board effort to obstruct this investigation and this impeachment inquiry,” Schiff said. “And I will just say this: they do so at their own peril. I remind the President that Article Three of the impeachment articles drafted against President Nixon was his refusal to obey the subpoenas of Congress.”
Trump and his Republican allies immediately attacked Sondland’s credibility and tried to downplay the importance of his testimony. The ranking Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, dismissed the hearings as “story time” and “asinine.” Republicans will emphasize that Sondland testified that the President did not personally order him to carry out the scheme. Sondland nonetheless said that he came to the conclusion that it existed. The audience that matters, though, is Republican members of the Senate, who would serve as jurors in an impeachment trial of Trump. Sondland testified under oath that the President manipulated U.S. foreign policy for his personal benefit, and that the White House is blocking the release of specific documents that corroborate Sondland’s account. For those Republican senators who have tried to maintain some distance from the President, the stakes are perilously high.
Trump Impeachment Hearings: William Taylor’s Unspinnable Testimony
Shortly after William Taylor, the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, began giving his opening statement at Wednesday’s impeachment hearing, two side-by-side images of him began circulating on Twitter.
One was a screen grab of Fox News’s live coverage of the hearing. Taylor, wearing a dark suit and wire glasses, his salt-and-pepper hair gently parted, is glancing down at his notes. Beside him, three text boxes contain what Fox News wanted its viewers to know about the congressional witness. “OCT 23: PRESIDENT TRUMP DISMISSED TAYLOR AS A ‘NEVER TRUMPER,’ ” the first box reads. “WH CALLED TAYLOR’S CLOSED-DOOR TESTIMONY ‘TRIPLE HEARSAY,’ ” the second box reads. “GOP SAYS TAYLOR HAD NO FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE ABOUT UKRAINE AID,” the final box reads. The other image was a corresponding screen grab of Taylor from MSNBC. Instead of three text boxes, the MSNBC graphics producers placed a single box with three bullet points: “Top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine since June”; “Testified he had ‘clear understanding’ aid tied to probes”; and “Texted it would be ‘crazy’ to withhold Ukraine military aid.”
Inevitably, in the days to come, Republicans will rely on their supporters in the media to present the impeachment hearings as a matter of interpretation. In the moment, though, Taylor, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and longtime diplomat, was sober and deliberate. Like his co-testifier today, George Kent, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Taylor took pains during his opening remarks to describe himself as nonpartisan. “I am not here to take one side or the other,” he said. “My sole purpose is to provide facts as I know them.” He carefully described the situation he stepped into when he became the acting Ambassador this summer. There were, he discovered, two channels of American policy toward Ukraine. There was the “regular” channel, in which he interacted with Kent and officials at the National Security Council, and there was the “irregular” channel, which included Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer; Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff; and others. It was through this “irregular” channel, Taylor said, that hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance and a White House visit were used to pressure Ukraine to provide Trump with political ammunition against the campaign of Joe Biden.
Taylor made clear the very real stakes of the political and security situation in Ukraine, noting that lives were lost in the current conflict while Giuliani and others allegedly used security assistance as a bargaining chip. He also offered a bit of news: recently, Taylor told the committee, he became aware that a member of his staff was at a restaurant with Gordon Sondland, the Ambassador to the European Union and occasional member of the “irregular” channel, on July 26th. At that restaurant, Sondland had a phone call with Trump that was loud enough for the table to overhear. According to Taylor’s staffer, Trump pressed Sondland about “the investigations.” And Sondland, after the call, told the staffer that Trump cared more about the investigation that he wanted into Biden and his son than about Ukraine.
In his opening, Taylor described how, when he was first offered the opportunity to return to government service and serve as acting Ambassador this summer, he consulted with two people: his wife and an old mentor. His wife opposed his taking the job. But his mentor told him that, if his government asked him to do something, and if he could “be effective” in its execution, then he should do it. So far today, it looks like he’s taking that advice again.
Trump Impeachment Hearings: Adam Schiff Emphasizes the Constitutional Stakes
In his opening statement at the first public impeachment hearing, the House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff argued to the American public that the future of American democracy is at stake. The Trump Presidency, he contended, threatens to reset the traditional checks and balances between the branches of government, limiting Congress’s ability to curtail the actions of a President who abuses his power. If Trump is not held accountable, Schiff argued, he will permanently embolden future Presidents and enfeeble Congress.
“If the President can simply refuse all oversight, particularly in the context of an impeachment proceeding, the balance of power between our two branches of government will be irrevocably altered,” Schiff said. “That is not what the Founders intended. And the prospects for further corruption and abuse of power in this Administration or any other will be exponentially increased.”
Schiff’s argument is a broad and complicated one. Most immediately, Democrats claim that Trump withheld nearly four hundred million dollars in U.S. security aid to Ukraine and dangled a White House visit in an effort to get the President of Ukraine to investigate the family of Trump’s potential 2020 rival Joe Biden. When members of Congress asked the Administration officials to testify before Congress about what occurred, Trump blocked them from doing so. In constitutional terms, the Democrats believe that Trump committed a high crime and obstructed Congress from investigating it.
Schiff is also tacitly arguing that the Ukraine call reflects how Trump has conducted himself as President: he has inflated his powers, relentlessly used his position for personal political gain, and incessantly lied about his conduct and that of his rivals. That argument reflects a central divide of the Trump era. Democrats see Trump as a fundamentally dangerous chief executive setting perilous new precedents.
Devin Nunes, the committee’s ranking member, claimed the opposite, arguing that the impeachment proceeding was a petty partisan effort by Democrats to undermine the President. Nunes and other Republicans frame Trump as rougher around the edges than his predecessors—more boisterous, blunt and looser with the facts—but in no way a threat to American democracy. Nunes mocked Schiff’s claim that Trump had committed an impeachable offense, dismissing the impeachment hearings as a “low-rent Ukraininan sequel” to the Mueller investigation. To Nunes, the hearings were the latest episode of Democrats’ acting out their febrile dream of forcing Trump from power.
The partisan split and the likely margin of victory in the weeks ahead was neatly reflected in a single phrase that Schiff used to make his case. His voice dripping with disdain, Schiff referred to a remark by the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, that an American President using American security assistance to get a political favor was nothing new. “His answer was breathtaking: ‘We do that all the time with foreign policy,’ ” Schiff said. “He said, ‘I have news for everybody. Get over it.’ ” Schiff argued that the President’s pressure campaign was “odious.” If Schiff and other Democrats hope to sway public opinion, they must demonstrate that Trump’s behavior is not, as the Republicans claim, politics as usual, but is, instead, unprecedented, dangerous, and deeply damaging to American democracy. In the noise of the Trump era, that is a difficult but not impossible task.
Impeachment Consensus Makes the Democratic-Debate Stage
Among Democrats, the debate over whether to proceed with impeaching President Trump is over. What’s left is an argument over how best to sell it to the country.
Photograph by Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
For much of the year that followed the 2018 midterm elections, leading members of the Democratic Party were split on whether to push for the impeachment of Donald Trump. The debate was concentrated in the Democratic Caucus in the House, where power over impeachment resided. In the Presidential-primary race, it was never a front-line issue. While several of the top candidates in the field—including Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, and Kamala Harris—came out in support of Congress moving ahead with impeachment, shortly after the release of the Mueller report, in the spring, others seemed content to wait for November, 2020. Whether for impeachment or ambivalent about it, the most visible members of the Democratic Party were not out on the trail loudly demanding it. They were talking to crowds in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina about broader issues—health care, inequality, climate change, gun violence.
The Ukraine scandal—which at its heart involves Trump inviting a foreign power to sway an election—has quickly and decisively changed all that. House Democrats have come around almost unanimously on impeachment. The Party split has also been resolved in the race for the Presidential nomination. Tuesday’s primary debate began with an expansive conversation about impeachment, and unity and resolve were the themes of the night. Down the line, the candidates seized on the aspect of the story that most spoke to them. Warren: “Sometimes there are issues that are bigger than politics.” Bernie Sanders: “This is a President who is enriching himself while using the Oval Office to do that.” Joe Biden: “This President . . . is the most corrupt President in modern history, and I think all of our history.” Harris: “Maya Angelou told us years ago, ‘Listen to somebody when they tell you who they are the first time.’ ” Cory Booker: “This has got to be about patriotism and not partisanship.”
Amy Klobuchar made a rhetorical move that is currently popular in Washington, lumping the Ukraine scandal together with Trump’s recent decision to abandon the Kurds in Syria into one big outrage. Castro, meanwhile, dismissed any suggestion that impeachment was a “distraction.” Tom Steyer plugged his years-long push for impeachment, while Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard both warned that impeachment would not address the underlying reasons for Trump’s rise. Pete Buttigieg, along similar lines, said he was thinking ahead to all of the problems that the nation would face on the day when, one way or another, Trump is no longer in office. “I want you to picture what it’s going to be like—what it’s actually going to feel like in this country—the first day the sun comes up after Donald Trump has been President,” he said.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, one of the night’s three moderators, pressed Biden on the seat that his son Hunter had on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to cough up dirt on the Bidens is at the heart of the congressional impeachment inquiry, and it prompted Biden to join the ranks of impeachment supporters in his party last week. Biden’s answer to Cooper’s question, however, might not have been as strong as his campaign would have wanted. “Look, my son did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong,” he said. “What I think is important is we focus on why it’s so important to remove this man from office.”
The debate over whether to proceed with impeachment is over. What’s left is an argument over how best to sell it to the country. On Tuesday, Sanders got the last word. “It would be a mistake if Americans came to think that Democrats were just taking on Trump,’ he said. “We cannot and must not turn our backs on the pain of the working class of this country.” No one disagreed with him.
Nancy Pelosi Responds to Trump on Impeachment at The New Yorker Festival
After President Trump accused the Speaker of the House of Representatives of hating America, Nancy Pelosi struck back. During an appearance at the twentieth annual New Yorker Festival, speaking with the staff writer Jane Mayer, she described the President as having “a grotesque personality” and accused him of “undermining the integrity of our elections” in a way that was “not only wrong and unconstitutional—it’s poisonous.”
Pelosi said that Trump’s pressuring of a foreign head of state to dig up dirt for his personal political benefit was “so beyond” that “he’s made lawlessness normal. He’s almost trying to make lawlessness a virtue.” She said that she couldn’t tell whether Trump was incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or if he simply doesn’t care. When he described his Ukrainian actions to her as “perfect,” in a phone call last month, she decided it was time to launch an impeachment inquiry.
“We’ll have an inquiry,” she told Mayer. “Give him all the opportunity to introduce whatever exculpatory information he might have, any evidence that might prove something to the contrary, to be very fair.” She acknowledged that impeachment is “divisive” and said that she understood those who say, of Trump, “I just don’t think he’s worth it to divide the country any further”—a position Pelosi once occupied. But she also argued that Trump has so violated norms and laws that “this is not about him.” She added, “The Constitution is worth it. The Republic is worth it. Our democracy is worth it.”
“Everything he says is a projection of himself. When he calls me ‘Nervous Nancy,’ I know he’s very nervous,” she said, in response to Trump’s name-calling. “When he calls Adam Schiff this or that, this and that, I think he’s projecting. He knows the argument that could be made against him—at least I think he should, or does—so he projects it onto somebody else. And you think, There’s his weakness. He knows.”
Pelosi called Trump’s attacks on Hunter Biden, the son of his potential Democratic Presidential rival Joe Biden, a “ridiculous thing,” and an example of his projecting onto others his own weaknesses: “His kids are so financially invested. Every place . . .” The live audience drowned out the rest of her sentence in laughter and applause.
