Last week, the House impeachment inquiry, after weeks of depositions in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, three floors beneath the Capitol, emerged into public view, as televised hearings got under way. The change in audience was accompanied by a dramatic change in venue: the Intelligence Committee has borrowed the lavish assembly room that is traditionally the home of the House Ways and Means Committee. The room, which was designed as the centerpiece of the Longworth House Office Building, across Independence Avenue from the Capitol, is the size of a small blimp, with a broad blue patterned carpet, draped curtains, and forty-foot ceilings. In 1949 and 1950, the space served as a substitute House chamber while the Capitol was being renovated. During the nineteen-eighties, the hallways just outside it earned the nickname Gucci Gulch, after the legions of loafer-shod lawyers who attended committee hearings to lobby for tax breaks.
The inside of the committee room is kept cold enough that on Friday, when Marie Yovanovitch, the former Ambassador to Ukraine, testified, at least one reporter wore fingerless gloves while she typed on her laptop. Some members of the public kept their scarves, knitted hats, and winter coats on after the testimony began. They had come from all over. Susan Malphurs, who attended the hearing with a friend she had met at a Women’s March in Florida, almost three years ago, wore a black blouse with a large peach-shaped brooch, and said that she was one of only a few Democrats in her home town of Kingsland, Georgia. Petter Udland, a Norwegian exchange student, was sitting next to Ashley Bonness, an emergency-room nurse from Washington, D.C. Mark Lisac, a retired fisheries biologist from Dillingham, Alaska, who wore a green fleece vest and a black “MAKE AMERICA SMART AGAIN” hat, said he’d waited in line since six in the morning in order to secure a seat.
On Wednesday, many Republicans in the audience at the hearing had emphasized how dull they found the testimony of William B. Taylor, Jr., the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. “It’s rather boring,” Debbie Lesko, an Arizona Republican, told me during one of the breaks. “Exceedingly dry,” Andy Biggs, another Arizona Republican and the head of the Freedom Caucus, said. But now Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, was complaining about “the Democrats’ day-long TV spectacles.” At the end of the hearing, and a few minutes before members of the audience gave the former Ambassador a standing ovation, Nunes went so far as to call it a “show trial,” as though Donald Trump were suffering the fate of a Trotskyist in nineteen-thirties Moscow. This was something Democrats had predicted, almost to the letter. Three weeks ago, when the impeachment inquiry was still taking place in private, and the Republicans’ main complaint was directed against the secrecy of the proceedings, Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat, told me that “the moment we move to public hearings, they will shift the argument to, It’s a show trial in front of cameras.”
The hearings, although not a show trial, were unquestionably designed by the Democrats to be, at least in part, a show. As the Republican counsel, Steve Castor, noted at the outset of Friday’s hearing, the stately Ways and Means hearing room had been transformed into a television studio: there were blinding klieg lights mounted atop the neoclassical friezes, choreographed entrances and exits by the witnesses, and shouts of “On your butts, guys” to the photographers and cameramen just before Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, gavelled each hearing into session. Schiff’s prominence as the de-facto leader of the impeachment inquiry made the Intelligence Committee a natural host for the public hearings. But the small size and relative sobriety of the committee also appeared to be a factor. By contrast with the other two committees that have participated in the private hearings—Oversight, which has forty members, and Foreign Affairs, which has forty-seven—the Intelligence Committee has just twenty-two members. It is also accustomed to conducting its business away from the cameras, and often with significant bipartisan coöperation. For the Democrats involved in the inquiry, who have taken pains to present their work as a solemn, careful undertaking, the lack of “pizzazz,” as Jonathan Allen, of NBC News, put it on Wednesday, was almost certainly a feature, not a bug.
Behind the spectacle, however, was a more subtle stagecraft. A few weeks ago, while the depositions were still taking place underground, Sean Patrick Maloney, a New York Democrat and a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me that that the goal of the proceedings was to “develop the hard facts and the real evidence, and . . . build our church on that rock. That is where this thing succeeds or fails, and should succeed or fail: on the facts.” When we spoke again last Thursday, however, Maloney recognized that the challenge facing the Democrats, now that they’ve moved into public and adversarial hearings, was different. “If you spend any amount of time with Jim Jordan and guys like that,” he said, “then you know that the facts and the evidence, even when overwhelming, are not enough. You need to tell a persuasive story that is more powerful than whatever smoke screen he’s kicking up.”
The structure of the hearings themselves served as a prophylactic to the sorts of disruptions that someone like Jordan, an Ohio Republican who was temporarily named to the Intelligence Committee for the public hearings, was expected to incite. By allowing untimed opening statements, followed by two forty-five-minute rounds in which only Schiff, Nunes, and their respective counsels could ask questions, the Democrats were able to keep attention focussed on the testifying witnesses. As Mike Quigley, an Intelligence Committee member from Illinois, told me, “The first rule of all this is to let your witnesses be who they are and get out of the way.” On Wednesday, Taylor alone spoke for forty minutes during his opening statement, and it was three and a half hours before a Republican representative other than Nunes was allowed to ask either witness a question.
From the beginning, the Democrats have seen in the Ukraine scandal not just evidence of Presidential misconduct but something they did not get from the Mueller Report: namely, a tidy narrative to make sense of the evidence. The Democrats’ drive to keep that narrative simple, urgent, and easy to understand is so pressing that, during a press conference on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, described Trump’s dealings with Zelensky as “bribery,” one of the two specific grounds for impeachment enumerated in the Constitution. (A Washington Post story said the change in language came “after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in key House battlegrounds” and found “bribery” to be more compelling than “extortion” or “quid pro quo.”) In a similar spirit, Democrats have scheduled the witnesses to help the public at home make sense of what they’re seeing. “There is a purposefulness to the presentation,” Eric Swalwell, an Intelligence Committee member from California, told me. “We want to present a narrative that people can follow.” As an aide to the Intelligence Committee explained to me on Friday, “We thought it was important to lay out the full time line for the American people, first with Ambassador Taylor and Mr. Kent, and then show how Ambassador Yovanovitch’s unwarranted firing was the start of this story, to set the stage for the later scheme.”
Nearly a month ago, Jim Hagedorn, a Republican from Minnesota who was not a member of the three inquiry committees, was denied access when he tried to enter the SCIF. Outside the heavy doors with red signs marked “Restricted Area,” he asked of the Democrats, “Why don’t they have public hearings now? Are they afraid that when people talk about it in real time it’s going to undercut their case and they won’t be able to spin it? That kind of seems like what’s going on.” Now that the public hearings have begun, however, with gavel-to-gavel coverage on all of the major networks, it’s become harder to press the case that Democrats are hiding something from the American public—harder, but not impossible. On Thursday, a Republican aide working on the impeachment inquiry allowed that “a reasonable person could infer that maybe there were some questions worth asking” about what happened in Ukraine last summer. Still, he complained to me that “Adam Schiff is holding all of the cards. He brings in who he wants to bring in, when he wants to bring them in.”
The Republican aide was especially unhappy that the Democrats have scheduled the testimonies of Kurt Volker and Tim Morrison, two of the witnesses requested by the Republicans, during the same afternoon session this week. “I think that was strategic,” he said. “I think they know that people watch in the morning and that the afternoon hearings get less coverage. Everyone’s working to file their stories. People aren’t watching as much TV in the afternoon. They’ve kind of gotten fatigued by all this talk in the morning.”
“What are Democrats hiding by broadcasting the inquiry during siesta?” doesn’t have the same punch, of course, as complaints about secret proceedings in an underground bunker. It was therefore not a surprise that many of the Republicans who watched the hearings in person last week—outspoken defenders of Trump, such as Biggs, Lee Zeldin, Mark Meadows, and Scott Perry, were frequently in attendance—focussed more on the substance of the witnesses’ testimony than the process.
Many of these Republicans were eager to argue that none of the witnesses brought by the Democrats so far had any firsthand knowledge of Presidential impropriety. As Zeldin saw things, the investigation was “a house of cards trying to connect dots that aren’t actually connected, and relying on second-, third-, fourth- and no-hand testimony.” But to maintain this hearsay argument was tricky in light of the available evidence, including the fact that Donald Trump himself had released the record of his July 25th call with Zelensky. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, had also confirmed to White House reporters that the security assistance was withheld, in part, because the President wanted Ukraine to investigate the D.N.C. One further difficulty was that the same Republicans who were calling for firsthand witnesses were making no apparent effort to persuade the White House to allow those witnesses to testify. On Wednesday, for instance, during a break in the hearings, Biggs told me that the Democrats’ case was “built on a foundation of hearsay.” But, when I asked him if he’d like to hear from Mulvaney, a former member of the Freedom Caucus, or John Bolton, Trump’s former national-security adviser—both of whom would likely have firsthand knowledge of the President’s actions and intentions—Biggs all but shrugged. “I don’t know what they’re going to bring to the table, actually,” he said.
Another central Republican argument for Trump’s innocence is that there was no “conditionality” in the President’s dealings with Zelenksy. For the Republican aide, the disbursement of security assistance to Ukraine on September 11th, fifty-five days after it was put on hold by the O.M.B., remains “the single most important fact” in the investigation. “The aid was released without any conditions having been met, right?” he said. But here, too, as Democrats have been quick to note, the broader context of the story suggests a less innocent interpretation. Congress received information about the whistle-blower complaint on September 9th, just two days before the aid was ultimately released. “The reason we call it a whistle-blower is because when the whistle blows, the play stops,” Maloney told me. “I mean, just think about how stupid this defense is. You come home from work early—the UPS guy is naked in the bedroom with your wife. They say to you, ‘Don’t worry. When we heard you coming up the stairs, we stopped, and nothing actually happened.’ ”
Maloney got his start in national politics working for Bill Clinton, the last President to be impeached. He participated in Clinton’s election campaign in 1992, and joined the White House as staff secretary during Clinton’s second term. I asked if his experience during that time offered any insight about the current proceedings. He said that when Clinton appeared on national television, in August, 1998, and admitted to having an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky, “it created the right space for his allies to articulate the defense that prevailed, specifically, Of course this is wrong and serious conduct, but it doesn’t warrant impeachment and removal.” Maloney believes that Trump’s fate will similarly depend not on what the President has done but whether his behavior should count as impeachable. As he put it to me in October, Republicans would “be better off saying the President’s conduct is indefensible, but we don’t think it’s worth impeaching him a year before the election. That would be at least an argument I could engage with.” On Thursday, he said, “The problem is, in this case, unlike an inappropriate sexual encounter, that is where democracy goes to die. It just can’t be O.K. to set the precedent that this President, any President, can run around the world coercing foreign leaders to start investigations and smear campaigns against their American Presidential political opponents.”
It’s likely not an accident that the most vocal Republicans have also been the most loyal of the President’s defenders. But, within the Republican caucus, Francis Rooney, of Florida, says, there are essentially three camps. “There’s the ones that are just playing defense for the President, regardless of any factual inquiry. Then there’s a bunch of people that are concerned about Rudy Giuliani conducting unofficial foreign policy in derogation of our professionals’ work. That’s not necessarily impeachable—that’s just unfortunate. Then there are people that are probably pretty concerned about using American power to bully a foreign country.” Rooney, who counts himself somewhere among the second and third camps, told me last week that he shares some of his colleagues’ concerns about hearsay evidence, but, in his view, “the fact that the State Department people are so honest and credible makes it a little easier to take them at face value.” He also accepts that Mulvaney’s statement to the press about a quid pro quo in October is “not good”: “It does kind of sound like it has to do with hurting Biden.”
The central question for him now is whether the allegations against Trump will turn out to be as bad as those that pushed Nixon from office. “Watergate was replete with crimes: cash contributions, paying plumbers, Nixon beating on the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. not to investigate, pressuring people in the Administration,” Rooney said, whereas right now, with Trump, he believes, there isn’t the same sort of “abject criminality.” “One instance of pushing a foreign government, no matter how odious, may not be enough to justify impeachment.”
The only current member of Congress elected as a Republican who has come out squarely in favor of impeachment is Justin Amash, from Michigan. Amash quit the Party in July, about a month and a half after the Mueller report first prompted him to state that the President had engaged in impeachable conduct. Last Thursday, outside the House chamber, Amash told me that he was also persuaded that Trump’s actions with respect to Ukraine were worthy of impeachment. “What matters is whether the President abused his office, and I think there’s overwhelming evidence that the President abused the office,” he said. “And so, to me, that’s the whole ballgame.”
Despite his support for impeachment, however, Amash was not without his criticisms of the Democrats. At the Taylor and Kent hearing, he said, “they focussed a lot on whether it’s bad policy to withhold assistance to Ukraine, and I think it’s more important to focus on the facts of the case.” He went on, “It took a long time into the hearing for Democrats to point out that the funds were released only after Congress started asking questions. That’s the kind of thing that you should put up front in your testimony. You want to hit that right away. So it seems to me like they weren’t as effective as they could be.” His former colleagues in the Republican Party and the Freedom Caucus, he said, had succeeded “at making it seem very complicated and making it seem like it’s just someone heard someone say something, and they don’t know that person at all, and nobody really knows what’s going on here. That’s sort of the game plan, is just to go out there and confuse everyone about what’s going on. The facts are pretty simple, but they have to be laid out by the Democrats, and I think they haven’t done a good enough job yet.” Still, he told me, “if the Republicans feel so sure about their position, then let’s see Mulvaney and others from the Administration come in and testify. Let’s bring them all in.”
Neither Amash nor Rooney expect a wave of Republican defections in the House to break in favor of impeachment. “There aren’t as many Republicans as there used to be in Congress,” Amash says. “So most of the districts that are still held by Republicans are fairly Republican, and you’re going to need to convince people in those districts.” But both congressmen are conscious that attitudes could shift quickly. If anything will cause that change to happen, Rooney believes, it’s damning testimony from someone with in-person access to the President. “They need a John Dean,” he said. “They need someone that has personal, firsthand, active, in-the-face testimony.”
Democrats, of course, reject the idea that they need more evidence than they’ve already amassed to make their case. At this point, Swalwell says, “I’m putting more faith in the constituents of my Republican colleagues than in my Republican colleagues.” Still, if there is a chance for a Dean-like flip, it resides—so long as Mulvaney and John Bolton refuse to testify before the inquiry—almost exclusively with Gordon Sondland, whose public hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. During his closed testimony, Sondland had proved a somewhat reluctant witness, responding to questions with some version of “I don’t recall” more than thirty times. But, in the days and weeks after that deposition, other witnesses put Sondland at the center of the alleged quid-pro-quo scheme, and painted him as someone who had bragged about his direct access to the President. Such testimony has already caused Sondland to amend his earlier sworn statements and acknowledge, contrary to what he’d suggested before, that he had, in fact, told a Ukrainian official that security assistance would not come until Ukraine announced investigations into the D.N.C. and Burisma, the company on whose board of directors Hunter Biden served. Then, on Wednesday, during his public testimony, William Taylor surprised everyone with the new information that his aide David Holmes had overheard Sondland talking to Trump on a phone call the day after the President spoke to Zelensky in July.
On Friday, Holmes testified in a closed session after the public hearing. According to his opening statement, during that July 26th phone call, Holmes overheard Trump ask Sondland if Zelensky was “gonna do the investigation?” Sondland allegedly said yes; according to Holmes, Sondland said that Zelensky would do “anything you ask him to.” After the call, Holmes testified, Sondland conceded to him that Trump did not “give a shit about Ukraine” but cared only about “big stuff,” like the “Biden investigation.”
Sondland’s testimony on Wednesday will be one of the most closely watched this week. When I asked the Republican aide how he’d respond if Sondland were to testify that the President personally demanded a quid pro quo, the aide replied, “I think he quite possibly would have perjured himself, if that’s the case, because it seems like he withheld that information in his deposition and his addendum to the deposition.”
The Democrats, for now, are withholding judgment. “None of us is interested in hounding Ambassador Sondland for his failure of recollection or his problems in completeness,” Maloney told me last Thursday. “Ambassador Sondland has very important information to share. He should stop playing games or dragging his feet and just tell the truth.” Swalwell, who worked as a prosecutor for seven years, was similarly accommodating. “I know the temptation is to accuse him of perjury or make all these accusations about him, but, in my experience, this happens all the time,” he said. “Witnesses are not straightforward the first time they are asked what happened. For a variety of reasons, they don’t want to give the whole story. The fact that he amended his story, I think, we should see as encouraging.” As for the Republican aide’s warning about Sondland facing changes of perjury, Swalwell said, “Republicans should be careful if they want to go after his credibility and say that his story changed. People are going to know why he was probably reluctant to tell the whole truth. He works for the most powerful person in the world.”
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