]]>
[The stream is slated to start at 10:00 a.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.]
The House of Representatives hears testimony from two key figures in the impeachment probe against President Donald Trump in the first round of public hearings Wednesday.
Top Ukraine diplomat William Taylor and senior State Department official George Kent will answer lawmakers’ questions about how the president’s associates, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a few political appointees, tried to pressure Ukraine to open an investigation into Trump’s political rivals.
The impeachment inquiry was set off after a whistleblower revealed “frightening” details of a July phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
During the call, Trump urged Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary, and his son Hunter, who had been a boardmember of a Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company. Trump and his Republican allies have questioned Biden’s call as vice president for Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who had a probe of Burisma’s leader. Biden’s actions, however, were consistent with many other countries at the time, who had called for that prosecutor’s ouster over allegations of corruption.
Trump also asked Ukraine to look into a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine and not Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton, not Trump. At the time of the call, the White House had been withholding nearly $400 million in military aid.
With these public hearings, the House is trying to determine whether Trump abused the power of his office by requesting foreign assistance in a U.S. election.
In earlier closed door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Taylor said that he was told military aid was dependent on whether Ukraine would cooperate with the request to investigate Biden, the transcripts said.
Kent in his private deposition last month said that Trump “wanted nothing less than Zelenskiy to go to [the] microphone and say ‘investigations, Biden, and Clinton,'” according to a transcript released on Nov. 7.
Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was the ambassador to Ukraine from August 2016 to May 2019, is expected to testify Friday.
