WASHINGTON, D.C — Braving 30 degree weather and harsh winds, diehard political junkies bundled in coats and scarves, holding “Remove Trump” banners on the sidewalk outside of the Longworth House Office Building on Wednesday.
Some had camped out the night before in hopes of earning one of the coveted seats inside the committee room where the public impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump was set to begin.
Inside the office building a line — two rows deep — of media and members of the public snaked down a corridor the equivalent of two city blocks.
“Big day,” one reporter murmured to another as they both patiently waited to be let into the grand, domed House Ways and Means chamber, where the intelligence committee had chosen to hold the televised hearings.
By the front doors of the Longworth building, a gaggle of television reporters and photographers waited to grab shots of witnesses and members of Congress. To stave off boredom, one photographer began snapping pictures of other reporters clogging up the hallways.
“You’re taking photos of each other now?” a congressional staffer asked.
“That’s what today is all about,” he quipped back.
But while an atmosphere of equal parts carnival and international media convention dominated the halls, in the committee room a somber mood hung over the proceedings.
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., a surprise addition to the House Intelligence Committee at the beginning of the new Congress, was seated in the front row between Reps. Sean Maloney, D-N.Y., and Denny Heck, D-Wash. On Welch’s desk was a large white ring binder, with the congressional seal adorning the front.
Next to the binder lay a black spiral bound book with “Unclassified” stamped across it.
Photographers and reporters mulled around the desks, sneaking photos of the documents. But the maneuvers did not go unnoticed and eagle-eyed committee staffers quickly descended to hide the papers.
Welch entered the room a few minutes before 10 a.m. — when the two witnesses were scheduled to arrive. The Vermont congressman was coming up to the ground level chamber after just being in the bowels of Congress, behind closed doors, in a sensitive compartmented information facility, known informally around the Capitol as a SCIF.
Welch ambled over to the the press corp as reporters from across the world mulled on the outskirts of the committee room, staving off the moment they would have to sit in rickety plastic fold-out chairs arranged with leg room akin to that found in economy seating on airplanes.
“This is the job I have to do at this point,” Welch said. “We have collective goals and that is to get the truth out and let the American people see what we saw in the private hearings.”
Moments later William Taylor, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Eastern Europe, took their seats in front of the intelligence committee as hundreds of cameras went off like an angry hornet’s nest.
The stage was now set for House Democrats to begin making their case why the president should be impeached.
Led by Chair Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Democrats began to methodically analyze the events surrounding a July 25 phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, as they attempted to show how the president is guilty of abusing the power of his office for his own personal gain.
The crux of the case is that Trump allegedly withheld $400 million in military aid and a White House meeting unless Zelensky opened investigations into the son of former Vice President Joe Biden — Hunter Biden — and possible Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.
“It’s really a simple question here, it’s whether the president leveraged his authority for his private political benefit,” Welch said after the first day of testimony.
Republicans were having none of this argument.
To them this was nothing but a Democrat-led effort to oust Trump from office, without regard for the truth, over an interaction of little consequence.
The Republican attack on the witnesses was led by the committee’s ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and the bombastic Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who has repeatedly defended Trump since he entered the White House in 2017, and was ceded the most time from his colleagues to question the witnesses.
Nunes, speaking with an even deliberateness — punctuating his sentences with long silences — mocked the Democrats’ efforts to impeach the president.
Taylor and Kent were congratulated by Nunes for winning leading roles in the “low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election in a desperate attempt to pin crimes on the president.
Jordan, bobbing in his chair, as he waited for the television cameras to focus back on him, used the bulk of his time alleging the unnamed person who blew the whistle on the phone call between Trump and Zelensky used to work with Joe Biden and that Schiff knew that person’s identity.
Schiff defended himself: “That is a false statement.”
Making his point even while silent, a sign behind Jordan read “93 days since Adam Schiff learned the identity of the whistleblower.”
It was after Jordan made his argument that Welch won the day with an off the cuff retort to the Republican that blew up Twitter.
“Now there is one witness, one witness they won’t bring in front of us, that they won’t bring in front of the American people, and that’s the guy who started it all, the whistleblower,” Jordan said as his five minutes of questioning expired.
Welch responded that he would be happy to have the person who “started it all” take the stand.
“President Trump is welcome to take a seat right there,” Welch said to loud laughs from the audience and had reporters scrolling through Twitter quick to look up.
After the six-hour hearing ended, Welch told a scrum of reporters he did not think much of the Republicans’ line of argument defending the president.
“If they had something, they could challenge the evidence, then they would attack the evidence,” Welch said during a debrief with reporters. “So a lot of what they said I view as totally mischaracterizing.”
But members of the media were not so quick to dismiss the Republicans’ tactics.
Karl Doemens, a grizzled reporter based in D.C. who represents a number of German newsrooms, said Friday he had been impressed with both diplomats earlier in the week, but wasn’t sure if the American public was willing to listen to a narrative that is becoming more complex by the day.
“You wouldn’t think that they are part of any type of conspiracy,” Doemens said. “So I think that was very convincing, on the other hand I have not the feeling that the public is 100% convinced.”
“It’s getting complicated and detailed and I don’t know whether the ordinary people follow this,” he said. “I think Sondland might be interesting next week because he obviously has something to explain.”
Forty hours after Taylor and Kent left the committee room, Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, took their place before House members.
The droves of press inside and out of the chamber were gone, leaving a modest collection for Yovanovitch’s Friday testimony, as she gave her account of how she was unceremoniously asked to step down from her post earlier this year.
“The pomp and ceremony is kind of done today,” said Ben Riley-Smith, a reporter for the London-based newspaper The Telegraph.
As if to illustrate Riley-Smith’s point, half an hour before Yovanovitch arrived, the horde of photographers sang “Happy Birthday” to one of their colleagues.
Soft spoken and without dramatics, the former ambassador told the committee she had been been relieved of her duties in April because of a smear campaign conducted by President Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, who had been in contact with Ukrainians she had angered with her attempts to root out corruption over the years.
While Democrats retained the same line of attack they had adopted on Wednesday, with Schiff making the case that Trump wanted Yovanovitch replaced with an ally who would work with Giuliani to get investigations into the Bidens underway, Republicans changed tack.
“I’m not exactly sure what the ambassador is doing here today,” said ranking member Nunes, dismissing Yovanovitch’s removal as a case of wrongful termination that was more suitable for a different committee.
When Schiff announced the hearing over after five hours, and Yovanovitch stood to exit the room, members of the public rose with her in a standing ovation.
But Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill maintained there was little substance put forward by the diplomats and that the Democrats theatrics missed the mark.
“More people are yawning than they are applauding,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said with a sly grin to reporters.
Would Meadows, as Welch suggested, lobby the president to allow witnesses with firsthand knowledge to testify, reporters asked?
“I don’t know that the president is going to pay attention to what this member from North Carolina may or may not say,” he said before walking off.
