Demonstrators march on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on Nov 8 protesting against climate policies and to impeach President Donald Trump. ─ AP
Both will be sharpening efforts to persuade American voters.
Republican Jim Himes said on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” what the public will hear is “immensely patriotic, beautiful articulated — articulate people telling the story of a president who — let’s forget quid pro quo; quid pro quo is one of these things to muddy the works — who extorted a vulnerable country by holding up military aid”.
But Republicans have focused their attacks with a resolution criticising the House process. Some in the party want to reveal the name of the government whistleblower.
Senator Lindsey Graham said on Fox News on Sunday, “I consider any impeachment in the House that doesn’t allow us to know who the whistleblower is to be invalid, because without the whistleblower complaint, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this.”
Graham added that there’s a “need for Hunter Biden to be called to adequately defend the president. And if you don’t do those two things, it’s a complete joke”.
What will Trump do?
For those watching television Wednesday afternoon, the president is offering some counterprogramming to the impeachment inquiry’s public hearing: a joint news conference with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, amid strains in relations between the two nations.
On impeachment, the president tried to give his allies on Capitol Hill some talking points on Sunday, tweeting out his advice for how they should defend him — namely by insisting, as he did, that his call with the Ukrainian president was “PERFECT”.
“Read the Transcript!” Trump intoned on Twitter. “There was NOTHING said that was in any way wrong. Republicans, don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!”
The White House released a rough transcript of his July call and Trump also says he will release, probably on Tuesday, an account of an April phone call he had with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, soon after Zelenskiy won election.
Testimony in the closed proceedings shows that the April congratulatory call did not raise concerns, but the tone shifted on the July call that caused alarms among US officials.
More transcripts, more hearings coming
House investigators have been steadily releasing transcripts from hundreds of pages of testimony they received behind closed doors.
More transcripts are expected. Nearly a dozen people have testified in the inquiry and investigators are building the public record of their findings. But this week’s hearings will probably not be the last.
House investigators may still call others to testify, most likely Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer assigned to the National Security Council, and Fiona Hill, a former White House adviser on Russia. Both testified behind closed doors of their concerns about the Trump administration’s effort to push Ukraine to investigate Democrats.
Eventually the Intelligence Committee will send a report of its findings to the Judiciary Committee, which would decide whether to pursue articles of impeachment against the president. A House vote on impeachment could come by Christmas.