The second hearing will take place on Nov. 15; Marie Yovanovitch, who was ousted as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine after a smear campaign backed by President Donald Trump, is slated to testify.
Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff of Russia conspiracy monger fame, announced the House Intel Committee will hold their first public impeachment hearing next weeks. Currently, two hearings are scheduled. One on the 13th and another on the 15th.
More from Politico:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said that the first hearing will take place on Nov. 13 and feature William Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of State — two key figures in the Ukraine scandal.
The second hearing will take place on Nov. 15; Marie Yovanovitch, who was ousted as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine after a smear campaign backed by President Donald Trump, is slated to testify.
The announcement brings House Democrats one step closer toward Trump’s impeachment.
Democrats consider Taylor and Yovanovitch among the most compelling witnesses to Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s leaders to investigate his political rivals, which is central to the impeachment inquiry.
Taylor was the first witness to explicitly tie Trump to a quid pro quo with Ukraine, with the White House withholding critical military aid to the country and a Trump meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until Zelensky committed to pursuing investigations into his political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden.
“It is a rancorous story about whistle-blowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption and interference in elections,” Taylor said, referring to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Yovanovitch was a casualty of that effort. She was recalled from her post in May amid a push by Trump and his allies, including Giuliani, to portray Yovanovitch as disloyal to the president.
Yovanovitch testified that she felt threatened by Trump, who disparaged her during his July 25 phone call with Zelensky. During that conversation, Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son Hunter as well a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 presidential election.
Last week, the House voted (mostly) along party lines to approve impeachment inquiry rules.
According to the Morning Consult, support for impeachment has dropped 4 points since the closed-door inquiries began.
Morning Consult explains further:
As House Democrats begin to release transcripts of closed-door testimony and prepare for public hearings as part of their impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, public support for impeaching the president has fallen.The latest Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 47 percent of voters favor the House voting to impeach Trump, down 4 percentage points from the share that backed it in an Oct. 11-13 poll. At the same time, 43 percent of voters oppose the House impeaching Trump, statistically in line with figures from the four other polls conducted on the issue since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced her support for the impeachment inquiry in late September. Each of the surveys have a 2-point margin of error.The Nov. 1-3 poll comes after the House’s 232-196 vote to lay out the rules for its impeachment inquiry, which is moving to a public phase following weeks of private testimony before a bipartisan audience of members of Congress. House Republicans were united in their opposition to the measure, which empowers the House Intelligence Committee to take the lead on the public-facing part of the investigation into Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.Forty-two percent of voters — including 48 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of independents — said they’d seen, read or heard “a lot” about the House voting to formalize its impeachment inquiry, making it one of the more widely penetrating events involving Ukraine and impeachment since news of the whistleblower complaint from a U.S. intelligence official first emerged.
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