House committee will hold first public hearings in impeachment inquiry next week

House Democrats will begin convening public impeachment hearings next week, they announced on Wednesday, initially calling three marquee witnesses to begin making a case for President Donald Trump’s impeachment in public.

The hearings will kick off next Wednesday, with testimony from William B Taylor Jr, the top American envoy in Ukraine, and George Kent, a top State Department official, said Rep Adam B Schiff, D-Calif, chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Next Friday, Schiff’s committee will hear from Marie Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine, he said.

“More to come,” Schiff added on Twitter.

All three witnesses have already spoken privately with investigators. Yovanovitch testified that she had been removed because Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s private lawyer, and his associates wanted her out of the way. Kent described career diplomats being shoved aside in favour of Giuliani and a shadow Ukraine policy being run out of the White House.

And Taylor, whom Democrats consider perhaps their best witness, laid out behind closed doors how he came to understand from others within the administration that the entire American relationship with Ukraine came to depend on its leaders publicly committing to conduct investigations into Democrats that would benefit Trump politically.

“Those open hearings will be an opportunity for the American people to evaluate the witnesses for themselves, to make their own determinations about the credibility of the witnesses, but also to learn firsthand about the facts of the president’s misconduct,” Schiff told reporters on Wednesday.

The sessions will not look like traditional congressional hearings, where Democratic and Republican lawmakers alternate asking questions in five-minute blocks and witnesses can easily avoid answering unfavourable questions.

The House voted along party lines last week to approve rules for an impeachment process for which there are few precedents. Those rules include allowing the top Democrat and Republican on the committee to designate questioning to trained staff and for each side to have up to 45 minutes at a time.

Investigators have already begun publicly releasing the transcripts from the testimony of several witnesses this week, including Yovanovitch, ahead of the hearings.

— NICHOLAS FANDOS

House Democrats released the transcript of William Taylor’s testimony.

The House committees leading the impeachment inquiry released another transcript from their investigation Wednesday afternoon. This time, it is the testimony of Taylor, a central figure in the inquiry.

Taylor testified two weeks ago in defiance of State Department orders, sketching out in detail a quid pro quo pressure campaign on Ukraine that Trump and his allies have long denied. Taylor is scheduled to testify next Wednesday in the first public hearing of the impeachment inquiry.

A State Department official begins testifying, the first administration official who appeared as scheduled this week.

David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, arrived Wednesday to testify in the impeachment inquiry, the first Trump administration official this week to comply with investigators’ request to appear. Democrats want to ask Hale, the undersecretary for political affairs, about the ouster of Yovanovitch, and why he and others did not defend her against political attacks.

The recall of Yovanovitch was part of the shadow foreign policy effort on Ukraine driven largely by Giuliani, who sought to smear her as disloyal to the president. Yovanovitch told investigators that she personally asked Hale to talk to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about issuing a statement of support. She said she never heard back.

Hale is one of four Trump administration officials who had been summoned to testify on Wednesday.

The three others were Russell Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget; T Ulrich Brechbuhl, a counsellor at the State Department who was among the officials listening in on Trump’s July 25 call with the president of Ukraine; and Rick Perry, the energy secretary. None of them were expected to appear on Wednesday. Vought and Brechbuhl were subpoenaed after they failed to appear at depositions last month.

Democrats are rushing to call the last of the witnesses they are seeking to interview as they wrap up the fact-finding phase of their inquiry and move toward public hearings. Schiff has indicated he will count refusals to appear as part of an article of impeachment against Trump for obstruction of Congress.

The lawyer for one key witness disputes another’s account of coffee and cordial chats.

The lawyer for Fiona Hill, a former top White House foreign policy adviser, on Wednesday accused Gordon D Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, of having fabricated conversations with Hill during his testimony to impeachment investigators.

Sondland, a wealthy hotelier and political donor before his diplomatic appointment, said that he had a cordial relationship with Hill, according to a transcript of his testimony released on Tuesday. Sondland noted several times that he talked with Hill over coffee, at one point describing her as furious at Trump and “sort of shaking. She was pretty mad.”

In a tweet, Lee Wolosky, Hill’s lawyer, said that Sondland had “fabricated communications with Dr Hill, none of which were over coffee.” He added that Hill, who resigned in July before Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, told Sondland what she told lawmakers, that “the lack of coordination on Ukraine” was disastrous and that “the circumstances of the dismissal” of Yovanovitch were “shameful.”

Hill has told investigators that she viewed Sondland as a national security risk because of his lack of experience.

— MICHAEL D SHEAR

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