THE U.S. House Committee on Intelligence held the first public hearing Wednesday since House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump in September to determine whether he abused his office in his interactions with Ukraine.

Appearing for the inaugural public hearing were William Taylor, Charge d’Affairs of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs. Taylor and Kent both attended closed-door depositions with House lawmakers in October, during which they voiced concerns about the president’s dealings with Kiev.

In his prepared opening statement, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said impeachment investigators are seeking answers from witnesses about whether Trump leveraged a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and millions of U.S. dollars in military aid to the country to pressure the Ukrainian leader to investigate Trump’s political rivals.

Devin Nunes, ranking member of the Intelligence Committee and the top Republican on the panel, in his opening remarks slammed the Democrats’ impeachment effort as an orchestrated smear campaign against Trump.

“We’re supposed to take these people at face value when they trot out a new batch of allegations, but anyone familiar with the Democrats’ scorched-earth war against President Trump would not be surprised to see all the typical signs that this is a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign,” Nunes said.

He criticized the Democrats for “pushing impeachment forward without the backing of a single Republican.” The Democratic-controlled House on Oct. 31 passed a resolution formalizing the impeachment inquiry with no Republican members voting for it.

Nunes listed three “crucial questions” the GOP expected for the hearings: The full extent of Democratic coordination with the whistleblower whose revelation of the Trump-Ukraine interactions triggered the impeachment inquiry; the extent of Ukraine’s meddling in Trump’s 2016 campaign; and the reason for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma to hire former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, as well as whether Hunter’s position affected government actions of the administration of former President Barack Obama.

Kent, the State Department official, said in his opening statement that he raised concerns as early as February 2015 about how Hunter Biden’s status as a board member at Burisma “could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” stressing, however, that he “did not witness any efforts by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny.”

Trump asked Zelensky in a phone call on July 25 to “look into” how Joe Biden “stopped the prosecution” of Burisma. In January 2018, Biden told an event at the Council on Foreign Relations how he in 2016 pressured the Ukrainian authorities to fire Viktor Shokin, the country’s former prosecutor general who was leading the investigation into Burisma at the time.

Kent also told the committee that he became aware of efforts by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his associates to “run a campaign to smear” diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch who was ousted in May. He said it “became clear” to him that “Giuliani’s efforts to gin up politically motivated investigations were now infecting U.S. engagement with Ukraine.”

Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, testified that in mid-July “it was becoming clear” to him that a meeting with Trump at the White House that Zelensky wanted “was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.” He added that the condition “was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani.”

Taylor told lawmakers in his opening statement that withholding security assistance to Ukraine “in exchange for help with a domestic political campaign in the United States would be crazy.”

He said he, on Sept. 1, was “alarmed” after hearing for the first time from Tim Morrison, the top Russia and Europe adviser on the National Security Council, that not only the White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky, but also the security assistance to Ukraine “was conditioned on the investigations.”

(Xinhua)