WASHINGTON — The second round of public impeachment hearings begins Friday following a day of both Democrats and Republicans sharpening their attacks.
At a news conference Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi boiled down her assessment of Wednesday’s opening day of testimony to one word: bribery.
“What the president has admitted to and says it’s perfect, and I said is perfectly wrong, it’s bribery,” the Democratic leader from California said.
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., dismissed the drama from Wednesday’s testimony as manufactured from a process controlled by Democrats.
“Name me one thing that those witnesses said yesterday was impeachable?” he asked reporters. “So why are we putting the country through this and why aren’t we working on the things that the American public expects us to do?”
That’s a message supporters of President Donald Trump are projecting through ad campaigns targeting House Democrats running for reelection in districts that Trump carried in 2016.
“Congress should be working on the issues the American people care about ... not getting bogged down in what is clearly a partisan impeachment charade,” said Dan Conston, president of the American Action Network.
The network, which is affiliated with the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, spent $2 million on the digital ad campaign designed to reach 37 congressional districts. The ad buy announced Wednesday follows similar campaigns launched by the Republican National Committee, Club for Growth and Trump Victory.
Utah Democratic Congressman Ben McAdams is among those targeted by the campaigns.
“The allegations against the president are serious and deserve congressional oversight, but it’s not my job to be glued to my seat following every word because I’m not on any of the relevant committees,” McAdams said this week. “My days are spent doing my committee assignments and moving forward on Utah priorities.”
Next witness
On Friday, the House Intelligence Committee will hear from former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The career foreign service officer was recalled from Ukraine by Trump in April after what her closed-door deposition described as a public smear campaign against her, orchestrated by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Yovanovitch left Ukraine months before Trump had a telephone conversation with Ukraine’s newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which is central to the impeachment inquiry.
In the July 25 phone conversation, Trump asked for a “favor,” according to a rough transcript provided by the White House. He wanted an investigation of Democrats in the 2016 election and political rival Joe Biden. At the time of the call, the administration was withholding $400 million in military aid from Ukraine.
But Yovanovitch is described in the phone call by Trump as “bad news, and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just want to let you know that,” Trump told Zelenskiy. Trump later added, about Yovanovitch, “Well, she’s going to go through some things.”
She told House investigators that she was “shocked” by the president’s words and felt threatened.
An analysis of the transcript of her testimony by Vox details events leading up to the phone call and her abrupt dismissal from her post. It describes Ukrainian officials warning her that two Soviet-born U.S. citizens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were associates of Giuliani, were working to have Yovanovitch removed from Ukraine. Both men were arrested last month on unrelated campaign finance violations.
Democrats and Republicans on the committee have already questioned Yovanovitch privately, and how they will question her Friday is unknown.
If they continue their approaches from the first day, Democrats will keep the focus on the president’s involvement and downplay Guiliani’s role. Republicans could dismiss her testimony as hearsay and too far removed from the July 25 phone call, which they say shows Trump did nothing that justifies removal from office.
Republicans stressed during questioning that the military aid was released to Ukraine and no investigations were conducted.
Is it bribery?
While all the witnesses scheduled to appear have previously been deposed by the committee, the first to testify publicly Wednesday disclosed new information that further connected Trump to allegations of a quid pro quo with Zelenskiy.
Toward the end of his testimony, acting Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor said he had learned more about Trump’s desire to have Ukraine investigate Biden from an embassy staffer who was at a restaurant with Ambassador Gordon Sondland when Trump called Sondland’s cell phone. The staffer overheard Trump ask about “the investigations” the president had urged Ukraine to conduct the day before in a July 25 phone conversation with Zelenskiy.
After the call, the staffer asked Sondland what the president thought of Ukraine. “Ambassador Sondland responded that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden,” Taylor said.
Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, sits on the committee and didn’t find Taylor’s new information “terribly compelling,” calling it more “second-hand” information from people who haven’t directly dealt with the president on Ukraine.
“I think even less credible is the fact that it’s an overheard conversation from someone who’s having a talk with the president with the phone pressed to his ear,” Stewart said. “And this individual is going to tell us what the president was saying? It just doesn’t pass the credibility smell test.”
But Pelosi used the testimony to focus the Democrat’s case for possible impeachment.
“The devastating testimony corroborated evidence of bribery,” she said. Pelosi later explained her choice of words, saying, “The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation into the elections.”
Bribery is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable offense, along with treason and other “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
But the speaker clarified that’s her assessment of the facts when she asked if articles of impeachment would be drawn up and voted on in the House.
“We haven’t even made a decision to impeach. That’s what the inquiry is about,” she said.
The House Intelligence Committee will report its findings to the Judiciary Committee by the end of the month. Judiciary will hold further hearings to determine whether draw up articles of impeachment that would be forwarded to the House for a vote by the end of the year.
If the House votes to impeach, a trial will be held in the Senate on whether to remove the president from office.
Only two presidents have been impeached, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and no president has every been removed from office. Facing impeachment, President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974.