BY KATE TURNER ’21
Wednesday, Nov. 13 marked the first day of public hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Testifying Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee were William Taylor, Jr. — the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine — and Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, George Kent.
In his testimony, Taylor told the Committee that President Trump cared more about “investigations of Biden” than he did about Ukraine. According to the New York Times, Taylor’s testimony, “tied [Trump] more directly into what [Taylor] described in vivid detail as ‘highly irregular’ effort to place the president’s political interests at the center of American policy toward Ukraine.”
On Sept. 24, 2019, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced that the House of Representatives would launch an impeachment inquiry to investigate Trump’s conduct towards Ukraine.
The inquiry was in response to a leaked phone call between Trump and the Ukranian president-elect, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which he suggested that Zelenskiy should “do us a favor” by investigating former Vice President (and Democratic presidential candidate) Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden’s, dealings in Ukraine.
According to NBC News, the phone call coincided with “delayed … delivery of aid to Ukraine, purportedly in order to review the funding program.”
Trump later told reporters that he had explicitly tied U.S. funding for aid to Ukraine to their corruption investigations, though he denied that statement soon after.
In early October, Marie Yovoanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, testified before the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees that the Trump administration had pressured the State Department to remove her from office earlier this year.
Later, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney actually admitted to a quid pro quo with Ukraine, stating explicitly in a press briefing that the withholding of funds from Ukraine was in part to put pressure on the Ukranian government to investigate the Bidens; a few weeks after Mulvaney’s testimony, U.S. ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland changed his testimony to report the same.
On Oct. 29, House Democrats released an official impeachment resolution, which was adopted on Oct. 31. The resolution outlined the parameters for the inquiry’s public phase, which, among other things, allows redacted transcripts of closed-door interviews to be published and authorizes the president to participate in proceedings held by the House Judiciary Committee.
Prominent Republicans and White House staff — including former national security advisor John Bolton and Mulvaney — defied the House’s subpoenas, refusing to appear before Congress. Over the next several weeks, the House has scheduled more public hearings leading up to and following their Thanksgiving recess.