WASHINGTON, D.C. — While President Donald Trump drew attention for his Twitter salvo on Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., refocused the House Democrats’ attack on the president during the second day of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry Friday.
Welch, speaking after Trump loyalist Rep. Jim Jordan, D-Ohio, targeted the Democrats’ handling of the hearing, said the inquiry is about whether the president abused the power of his office for personal political gain.
“The question really is about whether the president of the United States, any president, has the authority to withhold congressionally approved aid to condition a White House meeting on extracting from a foreign leader a willingness to assist him in his political campaign,” Welch said.
Yovanovitch testified to the committee that she had been been removed from her post because of a smear campaign orchestrated by corrupt actors in Ukraine that found an ally in Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
The former ambassador, who was relieved of her duties in April, said Giuliani had been in contact with Ukrainians she had angered with her attempts to root out corruption over the years. She testified the president’s lawyer then began to spread disinformation to give proper motive for Trump to require her return to the U.S.
Two days after William Taylor, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Eastern Europe, entered a jam-packed committee room to give their testimony, the mood was considerably more relaxed. On the second day of public testimony in the impeachment hearings, there was much less press jockeying for position to hear Friday’s witness, who was expected to be considerably less damning of the president.
However, throughout her testimony, Yovanovitch, who broke down in tears during her private deposition, painted a picture in which the State Department’s anti-corruption policy in Ukraine was being undermined by Giuliani. She also detailed how the president used “unofficial back channels” to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
“I still find it difficult to comprehend that foreign and private interests were able to undermine U.S. interests in this way,” Yovanovitch said. “Individuals who apparently felt stymied by our efforts to promote stated U.S. policy against corruption — that is to do the mission — were able to successfully conduct a campaign of disinformation against a sitting ambassador.”
“I do not understand Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me. Clearly, no one at the State Department did,” she said.
Yovanovitch, a 30-year foreign service officer, has been accused by the president of telling embassy employees to ignore his orders and of attempting to give assistance to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Yovanovitch says all such claims have no basis in reality.
She also said she had no direct knowledge of any criminal activity taken by the president or his personal lawyer.
House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., made the case that Trump wanted Yovanovitch ousted and that the plan was to replace her with a Trump ally who would be willing to work with Giuliani to get the investigations into the Bidens underway.
Republicans continued a line of attack they had started earlier in the week, saying Yovanovitch had no direct knowledge of the actions House Democrats have accused the president of and that they are relying on secondary and tertiary sources of information to condemn Trump.
“That’s why on Wednesday Democrats were forced to make the absurd argument that hearsay can be much better evidence than direct evidence,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the intelligence committee’s ranking member.
“I’m not exactly sure what the ambassador is doing here today,” he said, dismissing Yovanovitch’s removal as a case of wrongful termination that was more suitable for a different committee.
Jordan, who was bombastic in his critiques of Wednesday’s witnesses, was more subdued on Friday. The Ohio Republican chose not to directly attack Yovanovitch, instead choosing to target Schiff and the Democrats for shutting out opposition lines of questioning.
Welch, who conversed with Schiff before he began speaking, insinuated that Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, would have been amenable to this type of arrangement.
“The White House meeting and the release of the vital defensive aid, everything hinged on President Zelensky being willing to do that investigation that would benefit the Trump campaign,” Welch said.
“That is something Sondland was quite willing to do,” he said.
Sondland, an integral character in the ongoing impeachment saga who allegedly has firsthand knowledge of Trump’s attempts to pressure Zelensky, is scheduled to give public testimony on Wednesday.
During the proceedings, Trump took to Twitter to discredit Yovanovitch’s testimony, saying that everywhere the former ambassador had served had “turned bad.”
“It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors,” Trump wrote.
Schiff cut into the Democrats’ questioning time to give Yovanovitch a chance to respond to the president’s claims, and said that this was witness intimidation.
“I don’t think I have such powers, not in Mogadishu, Somalia, and not in other places,” a visibly shocked Yovanovitch said. “I actually think that where I served over the years, I and others have demonstrably made things better for the U.S. as well as for the countries that I’ve served in.”
When Welch spoke, he told Yovanovitch that she joins the esteemed company of Sen. John McCain, Gen. Jim Mattis, and others the president has disparaged.
“We’re not here to talk about that unless the reason you get insulted, as you did today — essentially blaming you for Somalia — is if this is another step by the president to intimidate witnesses,” Welch said.
In an another attempt to bolster the president’s defense, the White House released a mundane transcript of the first phone call between Trump and Zelensky, which took place directly after the Ukrainian president had won his election.
Nunes chose to read the full transcript, which portrays congratulatory banter between the two presidents, in his opening remarks. Nunes asserted the new transcript bolsters the case that Trump did not abuse the power of his office.
Schiff, for his part, said he was grateful Trump had decided to make the call record public, but demanded the president make more documents available.
“I would now ask the president to release the thousands of other records that he has instructed the State Department not to release,” he said.
For weeks the House Intelligence Committee has been investigating a July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, in which the U.S. president asked Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company in Ukraine from 2014 to 2019.
The phone call transcript of this discussion is what Welch has called the “smoking gun” in the impeachment inquiry.
Earlier this week, Taylor, a longtime diplomat who is currently in charge of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, said it was his “clear understanding” that Trump had decided to withhold $400 million in military aid and a White House meeting unless Zelensky opened investigations into Hunter Biden.
George Kent, during his testimony Wednesday, added that in mid-August Giuliani’s attempts to “gin up politically motivated” investigations into Hunter Biden and the 2016 election was affecting State Department dealings with Ukraine.
There are no public hearings on the schedule over the weekend, but the intelligence committee is hearing from a number of other witnesses in private depositions as Democrats continue to build the case against the president.
