WASHINGTON — The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine told impeachment investigators last month that it was Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, who instigated the drive to get Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political rivals, saying that Giuliani was acting on behalf of the president.
House Democrats on Wednesday released the private testimony by the diplomat, William B. Taylor Jr., as they named him as the first of several witnesses who will testify publicly next week in a slate of open impeachment hearings that will begin laying out a case against Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine.
In the debut of live televised sessions from Capitol Hill, lawmakers plan to question Taylor and George P. Kent, a senior American diplomat who oversees policy in the region, during a joint hearing Wednesday. Then on Friday, they will hear from Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, about her abrupt recall to Washington this spring amid a campaign to smear her as disloyal.
The announcement, after six weeks of fact-finding that largely took place in the Intelligence Committee’s secure chambers, was a sign that Democrats now feel they have assembled a strong enough record to present voters with their case that the president abused his power to enlist the help of a foreign government for his own political gain. The hearings will also almost certainly usher in a new, more intense round of partisan warfare as Republicans try to blunt what they see as an existential threat to Trump’s presidency.
All three witnesses Democrats have called for public testimony have spoken privately with investigators, giving damning accounts of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and of how Yovanovitch was treated. They have painted a portrait of a president determined to enlist Ukraine in smearing his political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden, and to use a package of military assistance the country badly needed and a White House meeting its new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, coveted as leverage in the effort.
While the transcript of Taylor’s testimony did not unearth substantial new information about the Ukraine affair, it made it clear why Democrats have settled on him — a military veteran and nonpartisan career public servant — as their first witness. In it, Taylor recounted in stark terms how he came to understand that U.S. policy in Ukraine was subject to a set of politically motivated preconditions that the president was demanding.
“That was my clear understanding, security assistance money would not come until the president committed to pursue the investigation,” Taylor said, according to the transcript.
It was the fifth transcript Democrats have released so far. Another, of testimony by Yovanovitch, laid out a vivid account she gave of how she was targeted by Giuliani and of how she still feels threatened by the president’s disparaging comments about her.
In his testimony, Taylor singled out Giuliani as the leader of the effort to get Zelenskiy to commit publicly to investigations that Trump wanted, including one of Burisma, an energy company that employed Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s younger son.
“I think the origin of the idea to get President Zelenskiy to say out loud he’s going to investigate Burisma and 2016 election, I think the originator, the person who came up with that, was Mr. Giuliani,” Taylor said, according to the transcript.
Democrats were not the only ones racing to position themselves for the inquiry’s new public phase.
A White House official said it would add two officials to help draft its public response to the inquiry. A senior administration official confirmed that Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, and Tony Sayegh, a former aide to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, would join the staff on a temporary basis.
And Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill were considering changes to the Republican makeup of the Intelligence Committee and road-testing new lines of defense of Trump’s behavior.
The news of the public hearings came as House investigators were working this week to complete private depositions with a half-dozen or so remaining witnesses. On Wednesday, they questioned David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, but three others skipped their scheduled appearances. Those officials were Russell T. Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget; T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a counselor at the State Department who was among the officials listening in on Trump’s July 25 call with Zelenskiy; and Rick Perry, the energy secretary.
Two more high-profile witnesses — John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff — are expected to defy congressional requests to appear Thursday and Friday.
Democrats unexpectedly pulled a subpoena Wednesday for Bolton’s deputy, Charles Kupperman, but it was not immediately clear why.
Kupperman had filed an unusual lawsuit last month, asking a federal judge to determine whether he should listen to Trump — who ordered him to not cooperate with House investigators — or comply with the subpoena.
“The subpoena at issue in this matter has been withdrawn and there is no current intention to reissue it,” the committee said in a court filing. The panel asked the judge overseeing the suit to dismiss the case, and said it expected Kupperman to abide by a ruling — expected in the coming days — on a related issue.
Kupperman’s lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, also represents Bolton. Democrats have not subpoenaed Bolton to testify. If they do, Cooper is likely to file a similar suit asking a federal judge to determine whether Bolton should speak with investigators.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said his panel, which is leading the impeachment inquiry, would soon announce additional hearings.
“Those open hearings will be an opportunity for the American people to evaluate the witnesses for themselves, to make their own determinations about the credibility of the witnesses, but also to learn first hand about the facts of the president’s misconduct,” Schiff told reporters Wednesday.
Democrats consider Taylor to be perhaps their best witness.
In an opening statement that became public at the time, Taylor laid out how he came to understand from others within the administration that the entire American relationship with Ukraine had become dependent on its leaders publicly discrediting Trump’s political rivals by committing to announcing they were opening investigations into Democrats. He singled out Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who Taylor said informed him that Trump had made a White House meeting with Ukraine’s new president and the delivery of $391 million in security aid for the country contingent on the investigations.
In the story Democrats are trying to build, Yovanovitch’s abrupt recall from Ukraine in May, at Trump’s direction, was an opening salvo in the pressure campaign that would follow. Yovanovitch, a career diplomat near retirement, testified that she had been removed not for cause, but because Giuliani and his associates in the United States and Ukraine believed she was standing in the way of investigations they wanted.
Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, described career diplomats being shoved aside in favor of Giuliani and a shadow Ukraine policy being run out of the White House.
The open sessions will not look like traditional congressional hearings, where Democratic and Republican lawmakers alternate asking questions in five-minute blocks and witnesses can easily steer clear of thorny issues. Instead, trained investigators — some of whom have experience as federal prosecutors — will be given lengthy chances to question and cross-examine the witnesses, allowing for a triallike setting that is likely to yield a vivid picture of how the Ukraine affair unfolded.
The House voted along party lines last week to approve rules for an impeachment process for which there are few precedents. Those rules include allowing the top Democrat and Republican on the committee to designate questioning to staff and for each side to have up to 45 minutes at a time.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, is considering swapping in Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and other well-known Trump loyalists for more moderate lawmakers on the Intelligence Committee who are seen as potentially less willing to defend the president’s actions as forcefully. Even though the panel’s Republicans are technically led by Rep. Devin Nunes of California, staff aides for Jordan, the top Republican on the Oversight and Reform Committee, have taken the lead in the private depositions.
After weeks of complaining vociferously about the investigative process itself, Republicans on the front lines of the inquiry are now shifting toward more substantive defenses of Trump.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., argued that even if Sondland and other officials said security aid and a White House meeting for Ukraine were contingent on investigations Trump wanted, the quid pro quo was not directed by Trump.
“When I get to ask questions, and when you see all of the transcripts, you will understand there is no direct linkage to the president of the United States,” Meadows said.
Another Republican close to Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, offered another line of defense to reporters in the Senate. Echoing an argument he used to try to insulate Trump’s campaign from allegations that it coordinated with Russia to tilt the 2016 election, Graham said Trump’s policy toward Ukraine was too “incoherent” to have involved intentional wrongdoing.
“They seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo,” he said.