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The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: What Happened Today
(about 3 hours later)
Vice President Mike Pence said on Tuesday that he would not comply with a wide-ranging request for documents from House impeachment investigators trying to better understand any role he may have played in the president’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to political investigations.
George Kent, a senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy, told impeachment investigators that he was all but cut out of decisions regarding the country after a May meeting organized by Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, according to a lawmaker who heard the testimony.
In a sternly worded response to an unusual request for documents, Matthew E. Morgan, the counsel to the vice president, accused the committees of requesting material that is “clearly not vice-presidential records” and blasted the investigation enterprise as a “self-proclaimed ‘impeachment inquiry’ ” that was ultimately illegitimate.
Mr. Kent had raised concerns to colleagues early this year about pressure being directed at Ukraine by President Trump and Rudy Giuliani to pursue investigations into Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
The House investigators had asked for documents to be produced by Oct. 15.
Mr. Kent’s testimony followed a pattern that has emerged among recent witnesses. The State Department directed Mr. Kent not to appear and sought to limit his testimony, according to officials familiar with the investigation. But the House Intelligence Committee issued a last-minute subpoena, and he complied.
The tone of the two-page letter matched that of one sent last week by Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, who made it clear the White House would not cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry, and instead intended to go to war against the inquiry.
Tuesday was the document deadline for Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Giuliani, the Defense Department and the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Pence and the O.M.B. rejected the requests. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani sent a letter to House officials saying that Mr. Giuliani would not comply with the subpoena he was issued.
“Never before in history has the speaker of the House attempted to launch an ‘impeachment inquiry’ against a president without a majority of the House of Representatives voting to authorize a constitutionally acceptable process,” Mr. Morgan wrote in a letter to the three Democrats spearheading the inquiry, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Investigators this week are calling in witnesses who aren’t typically part of the Washington news cycle: a former Russia specialist on the National Security Council, the ambassador to the European Union, a deputy assistant secretary of defense.
“Please know that if the committees wish to return to the regular order of legitimate legislative oversight requests, and the committees have appropriate requests for information solely in the custody of the Office of the Vice President, we are prepared to work with you in a manner consistent with well-established bipartisan constitutional protections and a respect for the separation of powers,” Mr. Morgan wrote.
The range of voices puts this impeachment investigation in new historical territory, according to Philip Bobbitt, a professor at Columbia Law School and a co-author with Charles Black of “Impeachment: A Handbook.”
Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, refused to comply with a congressional subpoena for documents that could illuminate his efforts to get Ukraine’s president to search for dirt on the son of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to a person familiar with the events.
The Clinton impeachment had little to do with governance, Mr. Bobbit told me.
Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer in the matter, Jon Sale, sent a letter to House officials saying that Mr. Giuliani would not give them the documents they requested, according to the person. Mr. Sale’s only role was to guide Mr. Giuliani in this specific matter.
“It had nothing to do with foreign policy or defense policy,” he said. “And in Nixon’s case, there were maybe a couple of dozen people involved.”
Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, is likely to hire new lawyers as he faces an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Prosecutors are looking at his involvement with two associates who were arrested last week on charges that included an alleged scheme to force out the United States ambassador to Ukraine.
The inquiry so far has leaned on witness depositions in addition to traditional evidentiary material like transcripts, which were a mainstay for investigators organizing the case against President Richard Nixon.
House Democratic leaders are gauging support in their caucus for a formal vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry, a striking reversal for Speaker Nancy Pelosi that would eliminate a key Republican talking point — that the inquiry is illegitimate because it was not authorized by the full House.
The officials’ testimony taken together, Mr. Bobbitt said, shows that what may seem like separate parts of the executive branch are likely to continue joining in surprising ways to tell an expanding version of the same story.
Ms. Pelosi would almost certainly have the votes to approve the inquiry, with 228 lawmakers — more than a majority of the House — now on the record supporting it. But the political risks could be substantial for some Democrats and Republicans whose constituents might interpret such a vote as a partisan attempt to undo the 2016 election.
“The president’s efforts at the disruption of governance — his suspicion of a ‘deep state’ he professes to find in the bureaucracy — is what’s coalescing all of these people dissenting from his administration,” he said.
Representative Jim Clyburn, the Democratic whip, began reaching out to Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday, as they returned to Washington after a two-week recess, to explore the possibility. Mr. Clyburn is focusing on vulnerable members in politically competitive districts, some of whom do not relish the spectacle of casting a vote to go forward with the inquiry, and would much rather keep the focus on a domestic policy agenda including lowering prescription drug costs.
Mr. Kent showed up to his impeachment interview today displaying that highly coded semiotic object known as a bow tie. Here’s what Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s chief fashion critic, had to say about the outfit:
Ms. Pelosi, who announced the beginning of the inquiry three weeks ago, has resisted holding a formal vote, noting that neither the Constitution nor House rules require it. Republicans, however, say that precedent dictates such a vote, citing the formal House votes to open impeachment inquiries into Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton.
Despite the death of the tie in many professional circles, from finance to technology, Washington is one of the few places where a man and his highly traditional neckpiece are seldom parted. Indeed, D.C. is so conservative when it comes to dress that almost as surprising as seeing a man with no tie in the halls of Congress is seeing a man with a … bow tie.
The White House has denounced the inquiry as illegitimate and an unconstitutional, and Republican lawmakers have assailed it as “a kangaroo court.” Republican strategists say their aim is to keep the focus away from the substantive findings of the inquiry, while assailing the way Democrats are conducting it.
Yet thus was the case on Tuesday, when Mr. Kent made his appearance before the House Intelligence Committee to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Kent was resplendent in a perfectly pressed dark gray three-piece suit, paisley bow tie, and matching pocket square.
The parade of administration witnesses heading to Capitol Hill to be deposed by House impeachment investigators continued on Tuesday, as George P. Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, was questioned behind closed doors.
After all, while the White House may have instructed him not to testify, he is his own man. His actions said it, and his accessories did, too. As to what he actually said, however, that was kept behind closed doors.
Mr. Kent, wearing a three-piece suit and bow tie, entered the obscured chambers of the House Intelligence Committee to kick off another jam-packed day for investigators. Lawmakers are scheduled to return to the Capitol from a two-week recess later Tuesday, and Democrats will huddle to compare notes on the direction of the inquiry. Separately, the committees leading the investigation had set a series of crucial deadlines on Tuesday for key witnesses and executive branch agencies, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to hand over relevant documents.
My colleague Catie Edmondson told me that Republicans, finally back from break, are scrambling to get on the same page: Senate Republicans are having a lunch tomorrow where they’re essentially going to work out their marching orders, while House Republicans have an all-member briefing led by Steve Scalise, the minority whip, to keep them abreast of talking points.
A new day, a new poll: A survey by Axios/College Reaction showed that 76 percent of college students now support impeachment. Breaking it down by party, the poll found 97 percent of Democrats, 22 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of independents approved of the inquiry.
Mr. Kent, who appeared despite the White House’s declaration it would halt witnesses from cooperating with investigators, raised concerns with colleagues early this year about the pressure being directed at Ukraine by Mr. Trump and his private lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to pursue investigations into Mr. Trump’s political rivals, according to people familiar with Mr. Kent’s warnings.
Tonight’s Democratic presidential debate, sponsored by The New York Times and CNN, is the first since Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared the formal beginning of an impeachment inquiry last month. Some political strategists say candidates should do their best to ignore the investigation. You can follow our live coverage from 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern.
As far back as March, they said, Mr. Kent was pointing to Mr. Giuliani’s role in what he called a “disinformation” campaign intended to use a Ukrainian prosecutor to smear targets of the president. Those included former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Marie L. Yovanovitch, then the United States ambassador to Ukraine, and Ukrainians who disseminated damaging information during the 2016 campaign about Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
The Impeachment Briefing is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weeknight.
Mr. Kent is one of a number of officials at the State Department and elsewhere in the administration who have been tapped by impeachment investigators to help corroborate the allegations in an intelligence whistle-blower’s complaint that said the president abused his power to enlist a foreign power to interfere on his behalf in the 2020 elections.
The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help provoked a heated confrontation inside the White House last summer that so alarmed John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, that he told an aide to alert White House lawyers, House investigators were told on Monday.
Mr. Bolton got into a tense exchange on July 10 with Gordon D. Sondland, the Trump donor turned ambassador to the European Union, who was working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to three people who heard the testimony.
The aide, Fiona Hill, testified that Mr. Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about a rogue effort by Mr. Sondland, Mr. Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, according to the people familiar with the testimony.
“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Mr. Bolton, a Yale-trained lawyer, told Ms. Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to two people at the deposition. (Another person in the room initially said Mr. Bolton referred to Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mulvaney, but two others said he cited Mr. Sondland.)
— Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos
Read more: Bolton Objected to Ukraine Pressure Campaign, Calling Giuliani ‘a Hand Grenade’
Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, said in an interview released on Tuesday that he probably would not have been named to the board of a foreign company if his last name weren’t Biden and acknowledged “poor judgment,” but he rejected suggestions by President Trump that he and his father had engaged in wrongdoing.
“Did I make a mistake? Well maybe in the grand scheme of things, yeah,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with ABC News. “But did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse? Absolutely not.”
“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” he said.
Mr. Trump has seized on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China to initiate a series of unfounded attacks against the former vice president, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, over the past month.
The interview comes two days after the younger Mr. Biden pledged that he would not work for foreign-owned companies if his father became president, and just hours before the CNN/New York Times Democratic debate that will be held in central Ohio, an appearance that is critical to his father’s presidential hopes.
— Katie Glueck and Stephanie Saul
Read on: Hunter Biden Admits to ‘Poor Judgment’ but Denies ‘Ethical Lapse’ in Work Overseas
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.
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.
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.
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.
