https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/06/politics ... index.htmlImpeachment investigators announce first public hearings next week
(CNN)House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff on Wednesday announced impeachment hearings will begin next week as Democrats prepare to take their case against President Donald Trump to the public.
Schiff, a California Democrat, said that three witnesses will testify next week: US diplomat Bill Taylor and State Department official George Kent will appear on next Wednesday, and former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is testifying next Friday.
The open hearings mark a new phase of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry into Trump and Ukraine and will be the first time that the country hears directly from the officials at the center of allegations that Trump pushed Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and the 2016 election in order to help the President politically. The hearings are the next step for Democrats as they move closer to impeaching a President for the third time in US history.
Impeachment investigators have heard from more than a dozen witnesses behind closed doors, piecing together evidence of a months-long campaign spearheaded by the President's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine that included an effort to remove Yovanovitch from her post and then to convince Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens and the 2016 election.
Taylor's testimony is among the most significant for the Democratic case that $400 million in security aid to Ukraine and a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were conditioned on Ukraine announcing investigations into the 2016 election and Burisma, the company that hired Hunter Biden. In his 15-page opening statement, Taylor explained how he was told that "everything" Ukraine wanted was conditioned on the investigation. The is no evidence of wrongdoing in Ukraine by either Biden.
Schiff said Wednesday that public hearings will show "the most important facts are largely not contested" related to Trump's use of "illicit" means to secure damaging information on his political rivals.
"Those open hearings will be an opportunity for the American people to evaluate the witnesses for themselves and make their own determinations about the credibility," Schiff said.
I was REALLY glad to see this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/p ... rings.htmlThe open sessions will not look like traditional congressional hearings, where Democratic and Republican lawmakers alternate asking questions in five-minute blocks and witnesses can easily steer clear of thorny issues. Instead, trained investigators — some of whom have experience as federal prosecutors — will be given lengthy chances to question and cross-examine the witnesses, allowing for a trial-like setting that is likely to yield a vivid picture of how the Ukraine affair unfolded.
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 staff and for each side to have up to 45 minutes at a time.
That will greatly reduce the Republican's ability to turn the hearings into some diversionary monkey show, (and frankly eliminate some of the counter-productive preening on the Demo side as well) and also be far more usefully informative for the American people...
