Democrats look to keep pressure on Trump as impeachment inquiry enters another new phase

So what do the latest hearings set for congress this week mean? Is this Donald Trump’s impeachment phase three? Whether or not you break it down, or see it as just one months-long process, it is a headache for the White House that it no doubt wishes will just go away.

But there is no chance of that for now. Democrats will be keen to press home the news headlines they gathered with the host of career diplomats that have publicly testified in front of the House of Representatives intelligence committee. Having had a few days’ break thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, the buck now passes to the chamber’s judiciary committee, led by Jerry Nadler, which will be holding its first public hearings on Wednesday.

Before that, congress will return from the Thanksgiving break and the intelligence committee will immediately vote – at 6pm local time on Tuesday – on chair Adam Schiff’s impeachment report, which will set out the case for the removal of President Trump. It is a procedural, so that the investigation can be passed to the judiciary committee, and is expected to be split along party lines – with the Democrats in the majority.

However, the timing means that staff at the White House will have little chance to catch their breath. Trump has tried to get his response in early, retweeting a number of articles about how the Democrats are “wasting time” on Saturday, and adding that he will be in the UK at a Nato summit when the hearings begin. “I will be representing our Country in London at NATO, while the Democrats are holding the most ridiculous Impeachment hearings in history. Read the Transcripts, NOTHING was done or said wrong! The Radical Left is undercutting our Country. Hearings scheduled on same dates as NATO!”

Trump has complained that a summer call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, which is at the centre of the impeachment inquiry into whether the US leader pressured Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden, has been misinterpreted. The president has also complained that his views have not been given a fair airing at the hearings, so Nadler has tried to undercut that complaint by offering Trump or his lawyers a spot at the hearing.

The president has suggested he may be open to testifying, but that appears extremely unlikely given the White House’s insistence that a number of officials cannot testify due to the president’s executive privilege. A federal court ruled last Monday that “no one is above the law”, including White House aides and they cannot ignore congressional demands for information.

The judiciary committee, which is to set to call four constitutional law scholars as the first witnesses on Wednesday, will ultimately decide whether the evidence gathered during the probe warrants drafting articles of impeachment that will be voted on by the entire house. There is little chance of Trump getting respite from impeachment talk before Christmas.