“When the transcripts get released, which is going to happen soon, and when the witnesses come before us in open session and repeat all this important information, these Republicans are going to long for the day when it was behind closed doors,” Representative Sean Maloney, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and has participated in the closed-door depositions, recently told The New Yorker.
On Wednesday, the House Intelligence Committee will hold its first public hearing of the impeachment inquiry against President Trump. William Taylor, the acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, a deputy assistant Secretary of State, will be the first public witnesses. A process that until now has existed as a cycle of reports, revelations, disputations, and document dumps will be consolidated under the rules and rhythms of open Congressional hearings. You can watch the proceedings on the live stream above.
For weeks, many Democrats in Congress have argued that impeachment is as much an exercise in trust-building with the public as it is in case-building against the President. The facts at this point are not in dispute: the President put the squeeze on a foreign country for his personal benefit. We’ve known that for weeks. It’s there to read in the readout—commonly referred to as a transcript—of the call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and in the whistle-blower complaint, which has been largely corroborated, detailing that call—and also in the reaction to it within the Trump Administration. On Wednesday, Taylor and Kent will be the star witnesses, but what they say and how they say it will be prompted by the force of the Democrats’ arguments and the clarity of their questions. Republicans will take every opportunity to interrupt, confuse, and attack the legitimacy of the proceedings. We know the facts, or at least many of them. On Wednesday, we’ll start to learn about the consequences.