This first stage of the House impeachment inquiry, being held behind closed doors under the chairmanship of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), is setting a firm, fact-finding, foundation for what is to follow.
These depositions, as described in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent Wednesday to all members of the House, portray an unusual format from the normal congressional hearing. Held in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol, the sessions are open to Democratic and Republican members from three House committees — Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight — plus an equal number of staff from each panel.
Witnesses, most under subpoena, are deposed under oath. At each session, Schiff opens with a statement and a Republican member, designated by the minority, makes his or her own opening remarks. The witness also can present an opening statement, although some do not.
At that point, the Democratic side gets one hour to ask questions. After that first Democratic hour, the Republicans get an hour for their questioning.
This is a far different practice than the five minutes back and forth in most public congressional hearings and allows for the development of facts. Another difference is that questions primarily are asked by committee counsels from the majority and minority, although House members on both sides also participate in the questioning.
After the first two hours, questioning has been done in 45-minute, alternate blocks. Since sessions have run up to nine hours, it is clear that many members of the three committees, Republicans and Democrats plus their staffers, have had an opportunity to help create the record.
When Trump complained in a tweet last Wednesday that “Republicans are totally deprived of their rights in this Impeachment Witch Hunt,” Schiff responded with a tweet of his own saying, “Here are the actual facts: Republican Members and their counsel are present for all committee depositions and hearings and have the same opportunity to ask questions of all the witnesses as the Majority. And rest assured, the public will learn the facts.”
Also in his “Dear Colleague” letter, Schiff explained, "At a time that it will not jeopardize investigative equities, we will make the interview transcripts public, subject to any necessary redactions for classified or sensitive information."
He also wrote, “We also anticipate that at an appropriate point in the investigation, we will be taking witness testimony in public, so that the full Congress and the American people can hear their testimony firsthand".
Ignoring Schiff’s Dear Colleague letter, some Republicans, despite their members’ participation in the sessions, have complained publicly about Schiff’s closed-door process. On Friday, GOP Minority Whip, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), asked on the House floor, “Are we going to finally get beyond this secret, closed-door star-chamber process of impeachment and get to something that is rooted in fairness?”
Schiff pointed out that in the past Nixon and Clinton impeachment situations, there had been secret investigations by special counsels using grand juries. In the Nixon case, grand jury material was turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, which used that material to draft articles of impeachment. In Clinton’s case, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr filed a report to Congress which was used to draw up impeachment articles.
In the Ukraine situation, CIA General Counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood and the Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson recommended that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Trump’s Ukraine phone call, to decide whether the President had committed a crime by asking a foreign government leader to develop information that could harm the Democrat who at the time appeared to be the leading candidate to oppose him in the 2020 election.
However, there was no FBI investigation, so in Schiff’s mind, his congressional impeachment inquiry is replacing what should have gone on before a Federal grand jury and that investigation would have been done in secret.
As Schiff explained it in his letter to fellow House members, “Unlike in past impeachment proceedings in which Congress had the benefit of an investigation conducted in secret by an independent prosecutor, we must conduct the initial investigation ourselves. This is the case because the Department of Justice under William Barr expressly declined to investigate this matter after a criminal referral had been made.”
A former federal prosecutor himself, Schiff has also said publicly, that by keeping secret what one witness has testified, he is trying “to ensure that witnesses cannot coordinate their testimony with one another to match their description of events, or potentially conceal the truth.”
He has also said his plan is eventually to publicly release the transcripts of all interviews, but versions that have been redacted for classified information.
Although a few witnesses have released their opening statements to the press, there have been a limited number of leaks from the Schiff inquiry, given the number of House members and staff that have sat in on the many hours of testimony.
Today, Ambassador William "Bill" Taylor, the chargé d'affaires and currently top official at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, will be the witness. In text messages delivered to the inquiry by Ambassador Kurt Volker and released to the public by Schiff, Taylor is seen questioning more than once the apparent relationship between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and alleged Democratic 2016 attempts to gather information about Trump and President Zelensky getting a desired meeting with President Trump.
On September 1, 2019, for example, Taylor sent a text message to Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who was coordinating the Ukraine activities for the White House. In it Taylor wrote, “Are we now saying security assistance and WH [White House] meeting are conditioned on investigations?”
Taylor’s testimony will be key to confirming the Democrats’ claims, outlined Monday in a fact sheet released by House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), that Trump carried on a “shakedown” of Ukraine and in so doing “betrayed his oath of office, betrayed our national security and betrayed the integrity of our elections for his own personal political gain.”
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