How Republicans are approaching the public hearings.
Welcome back to the Impeachment Briefing. With two days until public hearings, we're looking at how Republicans are approaching the next phase of the impeachment investigation. |
- Impeachment investigators released the deposition transcript of Laura Cooper, the Pentagon's top Russia and Ukraine official, who said the decision to delay almost $400 million in military aid to Ukraine left officials across the government baffled, questioning how President Trump could legally block aid that had already been appropriated by Congress.
- Ms. Cooper said the White House had asked about Ukraine's security aid in mid-June, nearly a month before the funding was frozen. She also said that the Defense Department had certified that Ukraine was making "significant forward progress" toward fighting corruption, undercutting the White House's rationale for the hold.
- There's drama swirling around the testimony of two major White House figures. On Friday, Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, asked to join a lawsuit filed by a lawyer for John Bolton, the former national security adviser, seeking a court ruling on whether he should defy the White House and testify. Then, Mr. Bolton's lawyer tried to block Mr. Mulvaney from entering the suit, saying the men had significantly different interests. And tonight, Mr. Mulvaney withdrew his effort.
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The witnesses Republicans want to call |
On Saturday, Republicans unveiled the list of witnesses they would like to testify in the public phase of the inquiry. Here are three categories they fall into, and what they tell us about the G.O.P.'s tactics. |
1. Burisma and the Bidens |
House Republicans say they want to talk to Hunter Biden, who once sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and Devon Archer, who also sat on the board and has functioned as Mr. Biden's business partner. Calling the two men would allow Republicans to mount something like an investigation within an investigation, interrogating them about their roles at the company, which Republicans believe presented a conflict of interest when Hunter's father, Joe Biden, was vice president. |
2. Occasionally favorable closed-door witnesses |
Three of the witnesses Republicans would like to call have already testified to investigators: Kurt Volker, the former special enjoy to Ukraine; Tim Morrison, a former National Security Council official; and David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department. While much of the attention on witness testimony has been on the parts that incriminate the president, Republicans believe some of what was said could also help clear him. |
3. Mr. Trump's "accusers" |
Republicans want the whistle-blower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry to testify, claiming that he was compromised because of his contact with the staff of Representative Adam Schiff, the Democrat leading the inquiry, and because he did not hear the July 25 call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine's president firsthand. Mr. Trump's allies on Capitol Hill have said the president should be able to face his "accuser," despite the whistle-blower's entitlement to anonymity. |
What is the Republican strategy? |
I asked my colleague Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress and was in Michigan this weekend talking to Republican voters about impeachment, how Republicans are changing their response to the inquiry. |
Catie, help me understand how Republicans developed a resistance strategy. |
Initially, Republicans in the House and Senate gathered the troops at lunches and caucus meetings and tried walking them through what impeachment would look like. Being in the minority, they haven't been able to call witnesses, so their power is in messaging. So you saw variations of talking points tried out. There was the argument that his call with Ukraine's president was inappropriate but not impeachable. Then there was a test balloon about how maybe he did try to make aid contingent on an investigation of the Bidens, but so what? |
Now they're banking on being able to message this as a purely partisan attack from Democrats. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, called it a "coup" on Fox News yesterday, a favorite term of Mr. Trump's. |
Now that they have a formal say in the public phase of the inquiry, what can they get out of this fantasy draft of witnesses that they have compiled? |
This is their chance to finally present a cohesive, coherent defense. They understand that they have a president who obsessively watches TV and cares about ratings, so this is an effort to try and produce results — a counternarrative — that the president would like to see. And it shows a blueprint for what they want to do. |
If House Democrats don't allow these witnesses to testify, Republicans can say they aren't getting what they need, that Democrats are violating their due process rights. That in turn allows them to say there are more questions around what those witnesses might know. Casting doubt on the procedural parts of impeachment is one of the few tools available to them. |
- We've heard a lot of overlapping accounts from impeachment witnesses about how the alleged quid pro quo between Mr. Trump and Ukraine's president evolved. My colleagues Sharon LaFraniere, Andrew Kramer and Danny Hakim wove a remarkable, month-by-month narrative pulling together weeks of testimony.
- What did Joe Biden actually do in Ukraine? A closer look at his record in the White House shows that he prodded the country's leaders to tackle the corruption that made it a risky bet for international lenders — and pushed reform of Ukraine's cronyism-ridden energy industry. According to my colleagues Glenn Thrush and Kenneth Vogel, he was hoping to enhance his statesman credentials at a time when he seemed to be winding down his political career.
- Using congressional testimony, public statements and press reporting, NPR annotated the whistle-blower complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry, showing how extensively it has been corroborated.
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