WASHINGTON - Witness transcripts in the impeachment probe into Donald Trump were made public for the first time Monday, with the former US ambassador to Kiev telling investigators she felt threatened by the president in his call to Ukraine's leader.
Democrats are entering an open phase of a congressional probe into potential abuse of power by Trump that has divided Washington as Republicans seek to defend him and his opponents press their effort to remove him from office.
The release of Marie Yovanovitch's deposition came as the White House hardened its opposition to the inquiry, with Trump's top national security lawyer defying a subpoena to testify early Monday.
The probe is examining how Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden, including by withholding $391 million in military aid that had been approved by Congress to help the US ally defend itself against Russian aggression.
Yovanovitch, who had urged Ukraine to do more to fight corruption, testified last month that she was ousted in May over "false claims" spread by questionable actors allied to Trump.
According to her deposition, she was alarmed by the deepening involvement of Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Ukrainian affairs, and in particular his efforts to get Kiev to investigate Biden.
She said she was "shocked" when she read the summary of Trump's July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump said the ambassador was "going to go through some things."
"I was very concerned. I still am," Yovanovitch says.
"Did you feel threatened?" an investigator asks Yovanovitch in the transcript.
"Yes," she replies.
Yovanovitch said Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov told her in February after speaking with Giuliani that it would be "dangerous" for Ukraine to become involved in US politics.
"He told me I really needed to watch my back," Yovanovitch said.
The release is the first of what House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said would be several key depositions.
He also released testimony from Michael McKinley, a former senior advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who resigned in September after concluding that the department was not defending top diplomats.
He said he asked Pompeo three times to defend Yovanovitch, eventually telling him that "this situation isn't acceptable." But the secretary was essentially non-responsive.
In his 37 years as a diplomat he had "never seen" efforts to use the State Department and its missions "to procure negative political information for domestic purposes," McKinley told investigators.
[BOLD] 'Irregular back channel'
The depositions demonstrate "the contamination of US foreign policy by an irregular back channel that sought to advance the president's personal and political interests, and the serious concerns that this activity elicited across our government," Schiff and the chairs of two other panels leading the investigation said in a statement.
Schiff said testimony would be released Tuesday from two more key witnesses, then-special representative on Ukraine Kurt Volker and US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
They were in text message chains in which diplomats expressed misgivings about the prospective quid pro quo of political investigations for military aid.
Prior to the release of the first transcripts, Trump sought to attack their credibility by suggesting, without evidence, that Schiff would "change the words that were said to suit the Dems' purposes."
Meanwhile John Eisenberg, Trump's deputy counsel for national security affairs, defied a congressional subpoena, a sign of renewed White House stonewalling.
Eisenberg is reported to have been on the July 25 call. But Trump said Monday there was "no reason" for witnesses to answer questions by investigators.
"This is just another Democrat Hoax that I have had to live with from the day I got elected," the president said.
Robert Blair, an assistant to the president and senior advisor to the acting chief of staff, also refused to testify.
Trump senior associate counsel Michael Ellis and White House budget office associate director for energy Brian McCormack were due for depositions too.
But Schiff said the White House instructed them not to appear, a clear signal that "their testimony would be further incriminating of the president."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON — William Taylor, the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment investigators privately Tuesday that President Donald Trump held up vital security aid for the country and refused a White House meeting with Ukraine’s leader until he agreed to make a public pronouncement pledging to investigate Trump’s political rivals.
In testimony that Democrats in attendance called the most damaging account yet for the president, Taylor provided an “excruciatingly detailed” opening statement that contradicted in blunt and unsparing terms the quid-pro-quo pressure campaign that Trump and his allies have long denied.
When he objected to that effort, Taylor said in his opening statement obtained by The New York Times, one of the president’s allies sought to explain Trump’s actions by noting that he was a businessman, and saying that, “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.”
Taylor’s testimony directly contradicted repeated assertions by Trump and his Republican allies that there was never a quid pro quo involving investigations into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, and other Democrats.
That is not true, Taylor told the committee. He said the president had explicitly made it clear that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, would not be invited to the White House or secure much-needed security aid unless the Ukrainian leader made a public announcement that his country would start the investigations that Trump so badly wanted.
Taylor testified that he was told of Trump’s demands for investigations during a telephone call with Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a Trump campaign donor, who Taylor described as part of a “highly irregular” diplomatic effort aimed at pressuring Ukraine.
“Ambassador Sondland said that ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Taylor told lawmakers. “He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskiy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”
Taylor added that: “During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelenskiy to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election,” Taylor said.
One lawmaker described the testimony as drawing a “direct line” between U.S. foreign policy and Trump’s own political goals.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who sat in on the deposition as a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said that Taylor relied in part on detailed “notes to the file” that he had made as he watched the pressure campaign unfold. His testimony shed new light on the circumstances around a previously revealed text message in which Taylor wrote to colleagues that he thought it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
He “drew a very direct line in the series of events he described between Trump’s decision to withhold funds and refuse a meeting with Zelenskiy unless there was a public pronouncement by him of investigations of Burisma and the so-called 2016 election conspiracy theories,” Wasserman Schultz said.
In his statement, Taylor placed the reason for the hold on Ukrainian aid directly on Trump, relating a July 18 call with the Office of Management and Budget, where a staff member said the directive had come from the president to the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.
“In an instant I realized one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened,” Taylor said in his testimony.
The intelligence whistleblower’s complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry said that Trump’s effort to pressure Zelenskiy to open an investigation of Burisma was part of a concerted effort to use the power of his office to enlist foreign help in the 2020 election. Taylor was the latest in a string of career diplomats and current and former administration officials who have defied a White House blockade of the impeachment inquiry and submitted to closed-door depositions with investigators digging into whether Trump abused his power to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political adversaries.
The president sought to discredit the inquiry with attention-grabbing rhetoric early Tuesday as Taylor made his way to Capitol Hill to testify, comparing the impeachment investigation against him to a “lynching.” His comment on Twitter drew bipartisan outrage in public as the ambassador made his case behind closed doors.
Wasserman Schultz said that in addition to referencing his notes, Taylor “had very specific recall of things,” including what she said were “meetings, phone calls, what was said.”
Several Democrats who participated in Taylor’s questioning described his testimony. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., shook his head after exiting the deposition, saying “what he said was incredibly damning to the president of the United States.”
Wasserman Schultz called it “one of the most disturbing days” she has had in Congress, and added: “I have not seen a more credible witness than this.”
Republicans accused Democrats of exaggerating, but they declined to share details of the testimony.
“I don’t know that any of us, if we are being intellectually honest, are hearing revelations that we were not aware of,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. “The bottom line is no one has yet to make the case for why the aid was withheld or even if the Ukrainians knew about it.”
Still, by Democrats’ account, Taylor’s testimony provided the most extensive picture yet of the scope of the president’s effort to pressure Ukraine and the players who were involved in the effort on Trump’s behalf.
“It’s like if you had a big, 1,000-piece puzzle on a table,” Wasserman Schultz said. “This fills in a lot of pieces of the puzzle.”
Taylor became a star witness in the Democratic impeachment probe after a colleague, Kurt Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine, revealed texts they exchanged. In some of the text chains, as Taylor expressed his concerns about an apparent quid pro quo, Sondland sought to take the conversation offline, telling Taylor to “call me.”
Wasserman Schultz said Taylor provided new context for and details about the exchanges with Sondland, including a phone call that occurred after the texts.
In his lengthy opening statement and in questioning afterward, Taylor laid out a meticulous timeline of events during his time in the administration.
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.
Taylor has shared his notes with the State Department but has not produced copies of them for lawmakers conducting the impeachment inquiry, a person familiar with his testimony said.
The State Department objected to Taylor’s appearance before the committee, according to an official working on the impeachment inquiry. In response, the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena Tuesday morning to compel his testimony, and Taylor complied, according to the official.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - News that US President Donald Trump's special representative on Ukraine had abruptly resigned didn't come from a high-profile newsroom in Washington or New York -- a 20-year-old student journalist on the other side of the country scooped them all.
Andrew Howard, a managing editor of The State Press student paper at Arizona State University, broke the news late Friday that Kurt Volker quit his position at the State Department after Congress ordered him to answer questions in an impeachment investigation of Trump.
"I didn't take a different approach to this story than any other," Howard told The New York Times on Saturday. "Everyone's looking for an 'aha' moment that I don't think was there."
Howard said he was looking for a local angle to a major story, and Volker is director of a national security institute run by the university.
A school official told Howard that the diplomat had resigned from his government post.
"I'm not sure we ever expected to get the scoop that we did," he said.
Howard was actually at his other job -- interning at The Arizona Republic newspaper -- when he broke the news that was followed by dozens of major US media outlets, which scrambled to match his exclusive.
A whistleblower complaint accused Trump of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to supply dirt on former US vice president Joe Biden, the favorite to represent Democrats against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Volker allegedly met senior Ukrainian officials on how to "navigate" Trump's demands of Zelensky.
Committees in the Democratic-led House of Representatives ordered Volker to appear next Thursday to answer questions.
acb/bfm
source: news.abs-cbn.com
