Trump impeachment news: Witness warns of Russian 'fictional narrative' in damning testimony as Republican conspiracy theories challenged
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Your support makes all the difference.The fifth day of public impeachment hearings has come and gone, with another pair of key witnesses delivering damning evidence against Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the president spent his time lashing out against the proceedings on Twitter, writing: “Never in my wildest dreams thought my name would in any way be associated with the ugly word, Impeachment!”
Mr Trump has had a more controversial week than usual, as his EU ambassador, Gordon Sondland, implicated the president in a quid pro quo with Ukraine during his own impeachment hearings - along with vice president Mike Pence, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. “Was there a ‘quid pro quo’?" Mr Sondland said in his opening statement. "As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes."
The president's critics have said the proceedings are exposing impeachable offences, including ex-White House ethics lawyer Richard W Painter, who said it was effectively “game over” for his administration. Mr Trump has attempted to undermine the inquiry, insisting that he barely knew his ambassador and wanted “NOTHING” from Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev. As all that happened, the Democratic 2020 contenders took to the debate stage in Georgia to attack Mr Trump as "one of the most corrupt presidents" in US history.
During the Thursday testimony, Fiona Hill, a former White House adviser on Ukraine, and David Holmes, a top staffer at the US embassy in Ukraine, testified about the irregular channel of communication in which Mr Trump pushed for a domestic-ally oriented political investigation.
Ms Hill told investigators that she believed Republican arguments claiming that it was OK for Mr Trump to ask for an investigation into Ukraine's 2016 role played into Russian talking points, and that furtherance of that played into their hands.
Mr Homes, meanwhile, told investigators that he was on the phone call that allegedly occurred 26 July, just a day after Mr Trump's call with Mr Zelensky. He said that he could hear the president speaking, even though he was not on spearker phone.
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Fiona Hill says she noticed former National Security Adviser John Bolton become physically tense during a meeting in which he tried to avoid discussing a White House meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I saw Bolton stiffen...it was unmistakable body language," she said. "I had to go to the lawyers...to John Eisenberg...to basically say that [Bolton] is not part of whatever drug deal [Mulvaney and Sondland] were cooking up.”
The impeachment hearings are taking a short break. We'll be back with live updates momentarily.
The House Intelligence Committee is set to reconvene momentarily, just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepares her weekly press conference -
Looks like even Fox News is reporting Fiona Hill's expert testimony about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election -
Fiona Hill, a former top White House adviser on Russia, has issued a full throated attack on what she has has described as the "fictional narrative" Donald Trump and his Republicans have pushed about Ukraine's role influencing the 2016 US election, during her opening remarks to the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment probe.
Ms Hill, who left the Trump administration this summer, told the House that Russia's entire goal in 2016 was to cast a political cloud over American democracy, implying that Mr Trump's push to investigate Ukrainian influence during that election was a product of a message "propagated by the Russian security services themselves."
"Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did," Ms Hill — who specialises in Soviet, Russian and European affairs —told the committee, apparently referencing Republican efforts to cast doubt on the extent of Russian meddling in the last presidential election. "This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves."
Donald Trump has tried to undermine claims that a US diplomat overheard him on the other end of a phone call to an ambassador – tweeting a bizarre message while the diplomat was giving evidence at the impeachment hearings.
The president tweeted: "I have been watching people making phone calls my entire life. My hearing is, and has been, great. Never have I been watching a person making a call, which was not on speakerphone, and been able to hear or understand a conversation. I've even tried, but to no avail. Try it live!"
The tweet was sent while David Holmes, a State Department official, was reading his opening statement in the latest public hearings in the impeachment inquiry.
He was appearing alongside Fiona Hill, a British-born expert on Russia.
We're on break from the impeachment hearings as politicians cast their votes in a separate matter:
ICYMI:
The impeachment proceedings should be beginning momentarily. We'll bring you live updates as soon as they start coming in.
Republican ranking member Devin Nunes is beginning with his opening remarks, asking both Fiona Hill and David Holmes whether they have met with Andrea Chalupa and others. Both said they did not.
The Independent's Andrew Feinberg provided this perspective from his conversation with a Republican congressman during the break:
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania, told me the testimony so far has been “predictable.”
“Just perceptions and secondhand information — ok, maybe a little firsthand information. It’s testimony that’s meant to be inflammatory, meant to be derogatory...and very little has anything to do with the president directly.”
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