This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: What Happened Today
(about 5 hours later)
William B. Taylor Jr., the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment investigators privately on Tuesday that President Trump held up security aid for the country and refused a White House meeting with Ukraine’s leader until he agreed to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
William B. Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment investigators that President Trump held up security aid and withheld a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, until Mr. Zelensky agreed to publicly announce that he would investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
In testimony that Democrats in attendance called the most damaging account yet for the president, Mr. Taylor provided an “excruciatingly detailed” opening statement that described the quid-pro-quo pressure campaign that Mr. Trump and his allies have been denying.
Mr. Taylor told lawmakers that Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, said “everything,” including the military aid, was dependent on such an announcement. “He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who sat in on the deposition as a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said that Mr. Taylor directly addressed accusations surrounding Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one of the leading Democratic candidates for president.
Mr. Taylor, who referred to detailed notes he took throughout the summer, told investigators about a budget official who said during a secure National Security Council call in July that she had been instructed not to approve the $391 million security assistance package for Ukraine, and that “the directive had come from the president.”
He “drew a very direct line in the series of events he described between President Trump’s decision to withhold funds and refuse a meeting with Zelensky unless there was a public pronouncement by him of investigations of Burisma and the so-called 2016 election conspiracy theories,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said.
My colleague Sharon LaFraniere highlighted six key parts of Mr. Taylor’s opening statement. Here are three of the most compelling passages:
“What he said was incredibly damning to the president of the United States,” Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, said earlier Tuesday.
1. Mr. Taylor described an explicit quid pro quo.
Mr. Taylor became one of the star witnesses in the Democratic impeachment probe after a colleague, Kurt D. Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine, revealed a series of text messages from September in which Mr. Taylor wrote that he thought it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
There appeared to be two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular … By mid-July it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelensky wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by [Rudy] Giuliani.
In his lengthy opening statement and in questioning afterward, Mr. Taylor laid out a meticulous timeline of events during his time in the administration, according to several members of Congress and a person familiar with his testimony.
2. Mr. Taylor was told Ukraine had to ‘pay up.’
Mr. Taylor’s habit of keeping notes throughout his tenure has given the inquiry a boost, allowing him to recreate crucial conversations and moments even as the administration seeks to block Congress from reviewing documents related to its dealings with Ukraine.
Before these text messages, during our call on September 8, Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.
Mr. Taylor has shared his notes with the State Department but has not produced copies of them for lawmakers conducting the impeachment inquiry, the person said.
3. Mr. Taylor said Ukrainians would die as a result of the delay in military aid.
The State Department tried to block Mr. Taylor from appearing for Tuesday’s deposition, or to limit his testimony if he did, according to an official working on the impeachment inquiry who insisted on anonymity to described the negotiations. So early Tuesday morning, in keeping with a pattern that has allowed investigators to extract crucial information from numerous administration witnesses, the House Intelligence Committee quietly issued a subpoena to compel Mr. Taylor to testify, and he complied. — Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Fandos
Ambassador Volker and I traveled to the front line in northern Donbas to receive a briefing from the commander of the forces on the line of contact … Ambassador Volker and I could see the armed and hostile Russian-led forces on the other side of the damaged bridge across the line of contact. Over 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war, one or two a week. More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance.
Read on: Ukraine Envoy Testifies Trump Linked Military Aid to Investigations, Lawmaker Says
My colleague Nick Fandos was standing outside of the secure room where Mr. Taylor was being interviewed. Here’s what he told me about the scene.
Mr. Trump took to Twitter early Tuesday to denounce the impeachment inquiry in ugly terms, describing it as a “lynching,” using a term associated with the murders of black people to describe a process enshrined in the Constitution.
Nick, it was just a few hours into Mr. Taylor’s interview that you started to sense something big was happening. What was going on outside the room?
The posting, which sparked swift outrage among Democrats and particularly African Americans, was the second time in two days that the president had publicly disparaged a concept central to the Constitution. On Monday, Mr. Trump referred to the constitutional prohibition against a president profiting from foreign governments as the “phony Emoluments Clause.”
You had dozens of reporters standing in wait of any word from inside the closed hearing room. One by one, Democrats started coming out. They made clear that the testimony Mr. Taylor had given was on another level from what they had been hearing. To a person, they said: “You’ve got to read the opening statement.” At the same time, you had a Republican come out — Representative Mark Meadows — and say he didn’t think he learned anything new today.
Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois, implored Mr. Trump to delete his Tuesday morning tweet, citing the ugly history of lynching in the United States. “Do you know how many people who look like me have been lynched, since the inception of this country, by people who look like you.”
Why were the Democrats so taken aback? Representative Andy Levin said that in his 10 months in Congress, this was his “most disturbing day.”
Some Republicans were also clearly uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s words.
These lawmakers don’t know what they’re going to hear ahead of time in any of these depositions. They seemed more genuinely surprised by this testimony, in part because there had been so much anticipation about Mr. Taylor, going back a few weeks. From what I understand, it took Mr. Taylor quite a while to read this opening statement. It ate up the better part of an hour.
Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, denounced the impeachment inquiry and said it lacked due process, but said of the president’s tweet, “That’s not the language I would use.”
What are lawmakers allowed to say?
“I don’t agree with that language,” Mr. McCarthy added. “It’s pretty simple.”
In a private deposition of this nature, members are not supposed to come out and discuss any details of the testimony. They can offer takeaways or general impressions. Today, members were coming out in real time, caught off guard, saying, “We can’t tell you what we heard, but you’ve got to hear what we heard.” Only until a few hours later were we able to put the whole picture together.
Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday that the president was not drawing a comparison between “what’s happened to him” and one of the “darkest moments in American history.” Mr. Gidley added that the president “has used many words” to describe news outlets that report unflattering details about him, and repeated Mr. Trump’s position that he was not getting “due process.”
Who is William Taylor? The former Army officer has served in every administration of both parties since 1985, and is known for his credibility. “If Bill Taylor says it happened,” said one former ambassador, “it happened.”
Read more: Trump Calls Impeachment Inquiry a ‘Lynching,’ Drawing Outcry
Mr. Trump described the impeachment investigation as “a lynching,” a fraught term that invokes the racist murder of black people. Even some top Republicans condemned the president’s words. “That’s not appropriate in any context,” Senator John Thune said.
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.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, denied telling Mr. Trump that a phone call the president had with Mr. Zelensky in July was “innocent,” as Mr. Trump has claimed. “You’d have to ask him. I don’t recall any conversations with the president about that phone call,” Mr. McConnell told CBS News.
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.
In his breakdown of a new poll, CNN’s Harry Enten highlighted some historical context: More Americans want to remove Mr. Trump from office now than they did Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon at this point in their impeachment hearings.
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 and here’s why political influence in foreign policy matters.
The Impeachment Briefing is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weeknight.
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.
