Recap of public impeachment hearing (ASL – 11.13.19)

Transcript

For the fourth time in U.S. history, formal impeachment hearings into the actions of a sitting a president took place today on Capitol Hill.

Previous impeachment hearings involved Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent were first two witnesses to testify in the impeachment inquiry.

Taylor went through an hour-by-hour account of what he clearly believes was Trump’s misconduct in an alleged conspiracy to use military aid to coerce Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s relations with Ukraine.

He also said there appeared to be two channels of policy making between the U.S. and Ukraine, one regular and one highly irregular, informal, unaccountable to Congress and included EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Kent testified that over the course of 2018 and 2019, he became increasingly aware of an effort by Giuliani and other associates to run a smear campaign to oust U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and other officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev.

Yovanovitch is scheduled to testify on Friday.

After Taylor and Kent read their statements, Democrats and Republicans were both given 45 minutes to cross examine them.

Representative Devin Nunes, the highest ranking Republican on the intelligence committee called the hearings a pitiful finale to the Democrats attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

He suggested the whistleblower that set off the chain of events leading up to the impeachment hearing was known to have a bias against President Trump and he called the entire impeachment hearing a sham.

President Trump told reporters he did not watch the hearing because he was too busy and it was a witch hunt and hoax.

He does expect to receive a report on the hearing when it’s complete.

The Closed Caption version of this video can be found here: https://sign1news.com/2019/11/13/sign1news-11-13-19/

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