[T]he House is set to begin its open impeachment process Wednesday with testimony centered on a key phone call that Rep. Peter Welch has called the “smoking gun” showing President Donald Trump acted improperly.
Testimony from William Taylor, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, will focus on the July phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, a call that figures prominently in whether Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine into investigating a political rival.
In addition to Taylor, the public will see two other witnesses give testimony this week — including George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Eastern Europe, who will also testify Wednesday and Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who is scheduled for Friday. The impeachment hearings will begin at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.
For weeks, behind closed doors, the House Intelligence Committee has been investigating the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, in which the U.S. president asked Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company in Ukraine from 2014 to 2019.
During a private hearing in mid-October, Taylor, a longtime diplomat who currently is in charge of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, told the intelligence committee Trump had decided not to give nearly $400 million in military aid or grant a meeting in the White House with Zelensky unless Ukraine opened investigations into Hunter Biden and alleged Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
Taylor also called the earlier testimony of Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the Europe Union, into question and led Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who sits on the intelligence and government oversight committees, to speculate that Sondland might have perjured himself.
Last week, House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., released transcripts of the private testimony from Taylor, Sondland, and others — which included additional information from the ambassador to the European Union.
While some members of Congress credited Taylor’s earlier testimony as a turning point in the impeachment inquiry, Welch has said it simply reinforces what was said in the call between Trump and Zelensky, which kickstarted the formal impeachment proceedings a month ago.
“From the beginning, that phone call with the president, I think, is the smoking gun. If Watergate had the tapes, this issue has the phone call where the president is asking a foreign leader to interfere in U.S. elections,” Welch told VTDigger in October.
Welch was not present for the preliminary testimony of either Yovanovitch or Grant, however he did hear Taylor’s description of events.
While Welch had limited time to ask follow-up questions during the Oct. 22 private briefing with Taylor, here is what Vermont’s lone House member, asked the diplomat in the closed-door hearing, according to the transcript Schiff made public.
Welch asked if Taylor knew the Trump administration was using a “secondary channel” — outside of the State Department — to shape Ukraine policy. Taylor and Sondland have testified that Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine into launching an investigation into the Bidens was led by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Taylor told Welch he became aware of the back channel negotiations in “late June and early July” but did not think it was necessarily a “conflict” between the official State Department policy and Trump’s agenda.
“You had specific information from people who had talked to President Trump, including Mr. Volker and Mr. Sondland, that what that policy was, was essentially to extract an agreement from the President of Ukraine to do these investigations and that everything — not just the White House meeting — but the aid itself, was conditioned on getting that agreement and that explicit statement,” Welch clarified to Taylor.
“And, at the end, there was an effort to ‘put President Zelensky in a box,’ which the public statement would make him do,” he added.
“Excellent summary, congressman,” Taylor responded.
