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The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: Latest Updates The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: What Happened Today
(about 8 hours later)
Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former top Russia and Europe adviser, is on Capitol Hill today to testify that she and other officials objected strenuously to the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine, only to be disregarded. Fiona Hill, the president’s former top adviser on Russia and Europe, testified privately before House investigators. She was expected to say that she and other Trump officials strongly objected to the removal of Marie Yovanovitch as the ambassador to Ukraine.
Ms. Hill, who stepped down from the White House’s National Security Council staff over the summer, viewed the recall of Ambassador Marie L. Yovanovitch from Kiev as an egregious abuse of the system by allies of Mr. Trump who were seeking to remove a perceived obstacle, according to a person familiar with Ms. Hill’s account. Ms. Hill viewed that dismissal as an egregious abuse of the system by allies of President Trump who were seeking to push aside a perceived obstacle to their own foreign policy goals, according to a person familiar with her account.
The removal of Ms. Yovanovitch has emerged as a key episode in the narrative under examination by the House as part of its impeachment inquiry against Mr. Trump. A career diplomat, Ms. Yovanovitch was targeted by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and other allies who were seeking to press Ukraine to investigate Mr. Trump’s Democratic rivals. Ms. Hill, who left her job on the National Security Council just days before the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, was the first person who worked in the White House to be interviewed by House investigators.
Ms. Hill will be the first person who worked in the White House to be deposed by House investigators and is appearing despite the White House declaration last week that it would refuse to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry or allow its staff to do so. The White House has not attempted to stop Ms. Hill from testifying, according to the person familiar with her account, but White House lawyers have exchanged letters with Ms. Hill’s lawyer about precedents regarding the confidentiality of presidential communications. Ms. Hill, like other witnesses in the impeachment investigation, testified privately — meaning it will take time to see a verbatim version of what she told investigators, if we see it at all. My colleague Nick Fandos, who was on Capitol Hill today, explained to me why Democrats are doing so much out of public view:
— Peter Baker The Democrats are trying to collect as much information as possible as quickly as possible. Big made-for-TV hearings are a chaotic and clunky way to try to build a body of evidence. They allow witnesses to line up their stories in advance and could easily backfire on Democrats trying to build a public narrative in real time.
Read more: Former Trump Aide to Testify on Pressure to Oust Ambassador to Ukraine Most congressional veterans would tell you that from a fact-finding point of view, you are better off following the Watergate model: Investigate in private first, then choreograph a series of public hearings that recreate for the public what the investigation found. Republicans, nevertheless, are accusing Democrats of impeaching a president in secret.
Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida is no stranger to creating a stir as one of the president’s most strident defenders on Capitol Hill. He threatened the president’s estranged personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, before Mr. Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee. He invited a notorious Holocaust denier to a State of the Union address. Democrats believe that two witnesses — Ms. Hill and Gordon Sondland, the Trump donor-turned-ambassador who inserted himself into Ukraine policy — are critical to understanding the July 25 call Mr. Trump had with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. I talked to Julian Barnes, who covers national security and the C.I.A., about the larger story.
And on Monday, he created a kerfuffle early into Ms. Hill’s testimony by crashing the former White House adviser’s deposition before it had even began. Mr. Gaetz, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, is not a member of any of the three committees — Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight — that are spearheading the impeachment inquiry, and was not invited to participate. Julian, what did Ms. Hill’s testimony tell us about the impeachment investigation?
Apparently unfazed, Mr. Gaetz said he called the House parliamentarian in an attempt to stay in the deposition — only to be told he was indeed not allowed to stay. The Florida Republican emerged from the secure deposition room and complained to a mass of reporters. What Ms. Hill likely helped outline today was the difference between our official foreign policy and the real foreign policy. Fiona Hill is the National Security Council official who, until her departure this summer, was supposed to be in charge of Ukraine policy and advise the president on it. But what we will likely learn from her appearance is that she was largely cut out of it. There’s this other foreign policy going on, directed by other people like Gordon Sondland, who were working on parts of this Ukraine policy that she never knew about.
“It’s not like I’m on the Agriculture Committee,” Mr. Gaetz said. “I’m on a committee that has jurisdiction over impeachment.” Why is it important that Ms. Hill wasn’t the one handling Ukraine policy?
— Catie Edmondson Mr. Sondland is the American ambassador to the European Union. On the books, he should have nothing to do with Ukraine. Ukraine is not part of the E.U. But in reality, he was tasked by Mr. Trump to work on Ukraine policy. He was deep in the mix of forming Ukraine policy, pushing the Ukrainians on what Mr. Trump was after.
The White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said on Monday that Mr. Trump “strongly condemns” a violent video shown at a pro-Trump event at his Miami golf resort, even as the president continued to attack one of the video’s subjects. So if Ms. Hill and Mr. Sondland were working on the same project — Ukraine policy — from competing lanes, how might that affect their testimony?
In the video, the president’s face is superimposed on a character in the movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service” as he rampages through a church killing all the parishioners, who sport the logos of media companies or the Photoshopped faces of political opponents. One of those opponents is Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. It appears right now that Ms. Hill and Mr. Sondland have two different agendas. Ms. Hill is coming in, it seems, in a nothing-to-hide way. She comes from a more neutral foreign policy tradition. She has left government. She doesn’t have a responsibility to speak the administration’s party line. Mr. Sondland is a defender of the president. He has decided to comply with a subpoena, but we don’t think he is going to turn on the president. Mr. Sondland is just trying to get his side of the story out.
Mr. Trump continued to press his attack on Mr. Schiff for paraphrasing the reconstructed transcript of the July conversation between Mr. Trump and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. That reconstructed transcript, released by the White House, appears to show Mr. Trump demanding his Ukrainian counterpart investigate a domestic political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., but Mr. Trump has tried to use Mr. Schiff’s paraphrase to say that the demand that fueled an impeachment inquiry was fabricated by the California Democrat. (It wasn’t.) Congress returns from a two-week break on Tuesday, bringing more of the lawmakers who are conducting the impeachment inquiry back to Washington. On Tuesday, investigators will interview George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state and Ukraine expert. On Wednesday, they’ll talk to Michael McKinley, who resigned as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week. On Thursday, they’ll hear from Mr. Sondland. On Friday, they’ll speak with Laura Cooper, a Defense Department official who works on Ukraine.
President Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate people and issues of political concern to Mr. Trump, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Here’s a timeline of events since January. This week is also the deadline for responses to document requests from some major figures, including Mr. Giuliani, Vice President Mike Pence, the acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and officials from the Defense Department and the Office of Management and Budget. The White House has vowed not to cooperate, though it has not blocked several officials from testifying.
A C.I.A. officer who was once detailed to the White House filed a whistle-blower complaint on Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Zelensky. Read the complaint. Trey Gowdy, a former South Carolina congressman, was announced last week as a new member of Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team. A day later, the arrangement quickly fell apart.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in September that the House would open a formal impeachment proceeding in response to the whistle-blower’s complaint. Here’s how the impeachment process works. How is impeachment selling? A search on Etsy, the online gift marketplace, turns up more than 4,000 impeachment-themed goods, including candles, pins, hats and mugs.
House committees have issued subpoenas to the White House, the Defense Department, the budget office and other agencies for documents related to the impeachment investigation. Here’s the evidence that has been collected so far. Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican Party suffered for impeaching Bill Clinton — a point some Democrats have made in arguing against the Trump impeachment. But that’s not quite right, our Op-Ed columnist David Leonhardt writes. History shows that Republicans paid a short-term penalty, while the costs to the Democratic Party appear to have been longer-lasting.
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