Public hearings in impeachment inquiry to begin

WASHINGTON - US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said on Wednesday that the panel's first open hearings as part of an impeachment inquiry into US President Donald Trump will begin next week.

Schiff said in a tweet that the panel will hear on Nov 13 from William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, an expert on Ukraine and Russia who serves as a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department.

Former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will testify on Nov 15, Schiff added.

Trump didn't take questions from reporters at the White House on Wednesday afternoon before leaving for a rally in Louisiana.

Schiff's announcement came after several weeks of closed-door depositions before House of Representatives panels by former and current Trump administration officials, including Taylor and Yovanovitch, as partisan battles escalated.

"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," Schiff told reporters at Capitol Hill.

The impeachment inquiry, launched in late September, is looking into whether Trump attempted to get the president of Ukraine to investigate former US vice-president Joe Biden in return for the release of US military aid to the country. Biden is a top-tier Democratic contender in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and Republicans largely dismiss the impeachment inquiry, now into its second month, as a sham. The White House has called the impeachment inquiry unfair and illegitimate.

House committees on Wednesday afternoon released a transcript from the testimony by Taylor, who testified behind closed doors on Oct 22.

According to the transcript, Taylor told impeachment investigators that it was his "clear understanding" that the "security assistance money would not come until" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky committed to pursue the investigation.

Taylor, who was an ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, also said Ukraine was not aware of a hold on the military aid until the end of August, over one month after a phone call between Trump and Zelensky. The phone call is at the center of the impeachment inquiry, prompting Republicans to argue that there was no "quid pro quo" ("this for that").

Xinhua - AP

(China Daily Global 11/08/2019 page7)