WASHINGTON -- The State Department's third-ranking official testified Wednesday for more than six hours in the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry as they investigate President Donald Trump's dealings with Ukraine.
David Hale had been expected to tell lawmakers that political considerations were behind the agency's refusal to deliver a robust defense of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
People familiar with the matter said Hale, the highest-ranking career diplomat in the foreign service, planned to say Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior officials determined that publicly defending ousted Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch would hurt the effort to free up U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.
Hale also planned to say that the State Department worried about the reaction from Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who was one of the strongest advocates for removing the ambassador, according to the people, who were not authorized to publicly discuss Hale's appearance and spoke on condition of anonymity.
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Several State Department officials have told lawmakers they opposed the dismissal of Yovanovitch in May, a personnel change that came at Trump's direction.
Hale's testimony came as the committees leading the impeachment investigation began to wrap up their closed interviews in the probe and move into the public portion of the inquiry, which will include open hearings.
"Those open hearings will be an opportunity for the American people to evaluate the witnesses for themselves, to make their own determinations about the credibility of the witnesses, but also to learn firsthand about the facts of the president's misconduct," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the Intelligence Committee chairman, told reporters Wednesday.
The panels this week also are releasing transcripts from previous interviews, in which lawmakers scrutinized Trump's appeals to new Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskiy to investigate political rival Joe Biden and the actions of Democrats during the 2016 U.S. election.
Impeachment investigators had scheduled closed interviews with 13 witnesses this week, but Hale was the first to show up. A series of White House witnesses have declined to testify, even under subpoena, after Trump directed them to stay away.
Yovanovitch has already appeared before investigators in the impeachment inquiry into Trump. According to a transcript of her interview released this week, she detailed efforts by Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of Ukraine, testifying that a senior Ukrainian official told her that "I really needed to watch my back."
She also testified that she asked Hale to get Pompeo to issue a statement defending her, but that statement never came. She said Hale asked her to send him a "classified email" with her "understanding of what was going on," which she said she did.
Hale was expected to shed more light on why the department did not step up to defend its top envoy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. According to the people familiar with the matter, he was expected to say he tried to distance himself and the department by removing himself from email chains about Yovanovitch.
Hale, for example, never responded to an email sent by former top Pompeo adviser Michael McKinley urging Pompeo to speak out in defense of Yovanovitch after the White House released a memo detailing Trump's phone call with Zelenskiy, the officials said.
One official said Hale had "tried to take himself out of the loop on Ukraine." But another official said Hale would defend Pompeo's actions as "politically smart" for the department and its employees in the long run.
Hale, a fluent Arabic speaker who joined the foreign service in 1984, has served as ambassador to Lebanon, Pakistan and Jordan and in posts in Tunisia, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. He is the highest-ranking State Department official to testify to impeachment investigators.
Other department officials have testified that they had concerns about Yovanovitch's ouster and Giuliani's role in it. Democrats are looking for connections between her dismissal, the holdup in military assistance for Ukraine and Trump's push for the country to open investigations.
[GALLERY: Adam Schiff: Public impeachment hearings to begin » arkansasonline.com/117schiff/]
Gordon Sondland, Trump's ambassador to the European Union, said in an addendum to his testimony released Tuesday that military assistance to the eastern European ally was being withheld until Ukraine's new president agreed to release a statement about fighting corruption, as Trump wanted.
Also scheduled to testify Wednesday was State Department Counselor T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, an adviser to Pompeo and close friend of the secretary. But Brechbuhl did not appear, instead departing with Pompeo on a trip to Germany early Wednesday.
Two more witnesses who were scheduled for Wednesday -- Russ Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and Rick Perry, the Energy secretary -- did not show up. Both have strongly criticized the proceeding.
The Intelligence Committee will hold the first open hearings of the inquiry next week, with three diplomats who've provided key closed testimony in the Ukraine controversy set to appear.
Next Wednesday, William Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, will testify, Schiff announced in a tweet.
On Nov. 15, Yovanovitch will testify, he added.
TESTIMONY RELEASED
Also Wednesday, House investigators released a transcript of Taylor's closed testimony, in which he told lawmakers that it was his "clear understanding" that U.S. military aid would not be sent until that country pursued investigations that could politically benefit Trump.
At the end of his testimony, Taylor was able to connect the request for a Biden investigation to Giuliani, but not to the president directly.
Under questioning from Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., Taylor conceded he didn't "know what was in the president's mind."
"What I know," he said, "is that the direction was coming from Giuliani."
Taylor also conceded that he had not spoken directly with Trump or Giuliani about the matter, only to two other diplomats, Sondland and former Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker.
Taylor told impeachment investigators that Sondland did not want the July 25 call between Trump and Zelenskiy transcribed, a request that broke State Department protocol.
"The State Department operations center agreed," Taylor said in his closed testimony. "In response to his request, they said, we won't monitor and will not -- and we certainly won't transcribe because we're going to sign off."
Under normal circumstances, those staff members would have stayed on the line during a phone call with a head of state to transcribe and take notes for the official record, Taylor said.
The ambassador testified that Sondland also told him about a change in the time of the call and said he believed Sondland's staff was not aware of it.
"I asked him something like, shouldn't we let everybody else know who's supposed to be on this call? And the answer was, don't worry about it," Taylor said.
"This suggested to me that the normal channel, where you would have staff on the phone call, was being cut out."
Top House Democrats issued a statement on Taylor's testimony:
"The testimony of Ambassador Taylor -- a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and nonpartisan diplomat -- shows how President Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine and conditioned its release, as well as a vital White House meeting, on the President of Ukraine publicly announcing investigations into debunked conspiracy theories involving the Bidens and the 2016 election," the three Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry said in a joint statement.
They argued that Taylor's testimony shows how a "shadow foreign policy channel" pursued by Giuliani, along with Sondland and Volker, "placed immense pressure on the Ukrainian government to accomplish the President's goal."
"Ambassador Taylor makes clear why this military aid and continued bipartisan support for Ukraine are so critically important -- and why these efforts to undermine U.S. foreign policy for domestic political reasons were so damaging," the statement said.
It was issued by Schiff, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and acting Oversight and Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Separately, the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., on Wednesday tweeted a link to a story on the Breitbart website that used the name of a person who has been identified in conservative circles as the whistleblower who spurred the impeachment inquiry. He also included the name in his tweet.
The president has criticized media outlets for not reporting the name that has been circulated recently. Yet Trump has carefully avoided using the name himself.
Exposing the whistleblower could be a violation of federal law. While there's little chance the president could face charges, revealing the name could give Democrats more impeachment fodder. It also could prompt a backlash among some Senate Republicans who have long defended whistleblowers.
U.S. whistleblower laws exist to protect the identity and careers of people who bring forward accusations of wrongdoing by government officials. Lawmakers in both parties have historically backed those protections.
In a statement shortly after Trump Jr.'s tweet, the whistleblower's attorneys warned that "Identifying any suspected name for the whistleblower will place that individual and their family at risk of serious harm."
The statement by Andrew Bakaj and Mark Zaid said that "publication or promotion of a name shows the desperation to deflect from the substance of the whistleblower complaint. It will not relieve the President of the need to address the substantive allegations, all of which have been substantially proven to be true."
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Lee, Mary Clare Jalonick, Mark Sherman and Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press; by John Wagner, Felicia Sonmez and Colby Itkowitz of The Washington Post; and by Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.
A Section on 11/07/2019