Pelosi invites Trump to provide testimony

More hearings set in impeachment inquiry

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., left, and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., right, listen as they wait to speak at an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019, regarding the earlier oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of President Trump's decision to end the Obama-era, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., left, and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., right, listen as they wait to speak at an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019, regarding the earlier oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of President Trump's decision to end the Obama-era, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited President Donald Trump to testify in front of investigators in the House impeachment inquiry, making the offer in an interview that aired Sunday ahead of a week that will see several key witnesses appear publicly.

Pushing back against accusations from the president that the process has been stacked against him, Pelosi said Trump is welcome to appear or answer questions in writing, if he chooses.

"If he has information that is exculpatory ... then we look forward to seeing it," the California Democrat said in an interview on CBS' Face the Nation. Trump "could come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if he wants," she said.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., echoed that suggestion.

"If Donald Trump doesn't agree with what he's hearing, doesn't like what he's hearing, he shouldn't tweet. He should come to the committee and testify under oath. And he should allow all those around him to come to the committee and testify under oath," Schumer told reporters.

Schumer said the White House's insistence on blocking witnesses from cooperating begs the question: "What is he hiding?"

The House Intelligence Committee is preparing for a second week of public hearings as part of its inquiry, including with Gordon Sondland, Trump's ambassador to the European Union.

Sondland is among the only people interviewed to date who had direct conversations with the president about the situation because the White House has blocked others from cooperating. Testimony from other witnesses suggests he was intimately involved in discussions that are at the heart of the investigation into whether Trump held up U.S. military aid to Ukraine to try to pressure the country's president to announce an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 presidential candidate, and his son Hunter.

Multiple witnesses testified of overhearing a phone call in which Trump and Sondland discussed efforts to push for the investigations. In private testimony to impeachment investigators made public Saturday, Tim Morrison, a former National Security Council aide and longtime Republican defense hawk, said Sondland told him that he was discussing Ukraine matters directly with Trump.

Morrison said Sondland and Trump had spoken approximately five times between July 15 and Sept. 11 -- the weeks that $391 million in U.S. assistance was withheld from Ukraine before it was released.

He recounted that Sondland told a top Ukrainian official in a meeting that the vital U.S. military assistance might be freed up if the country's top prosecutor "would go to the mike and announce that he was opening the Burisma investigation." Burisma is the gas company that hired Hunter Biden.

Morrison's testimony contradicted much of what Sondland told congressional investigators during his own closed deposition, which the ambassador later amended.

Trump has said he has no recollection of the overheard call and has suggested he barely knew Sondland, a wealthy donor to his 2016 campaign. But Democrats are hoping Sondland sheds new light on the discussions.

"I'm not going to try to prejudge his testimony," Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said on Fox News Sunday. But he suggested: "it was not lost on Ambassador Sondland what happened to the president's close associate Roger Stone for lying to Congress, to Michael Cohen for lying to Congress. My guess is that Ambassador Sondland is going to do his level best to tell the truth, because otherwise he may have a very unpleasant legal future in front of him."

The committee will also be interviewing a long list of other witnesses. On Tuesday, it will hear from Morrison; Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence; Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the director for European affairs at the National Security Council; and Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine.

On Wednesday, the committee will hear from Sondland in addition to Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, and David Hale, a State Department official. And on Thursday, Fiona Hill, a former top National Security Council staffer for Europe and Russia, will be interviewed.

LAWMAKERS' ARGUMENTS

Pelosi said the public phase of the House Intelligence Committee hearings would continue for at least another week, while additional depositions are taken from other witnesses. But she said she didn't know when the hearings would end.

"I guess it depends on how many more witnesses they have," she said. "That's up to the committee. I don't guide that."

Pelosi headlined a group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers who appeared on Sunday morning political shows to argue, respectively, that the case for impeachment against Trump is building or to defend the president and criticize the way Democrats are conducting the inquiry.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a vocal Trump ally who was recently added to the Intelligence Committee, suggested on CBS that the aid was released after Trump and U.S. officials spoke with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and became convinced he "was legit and he was worth the risk" of U.S. funding.

"So there was never this quid pro quo that the Democrats all promise existed," Jordan said.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., another member of the Intelligence Committee, said on ABC's This Week that evidence of impeachable offenses against Trump is building. He criticized Republican efforts to dismiss it as "it happens all the time" and "so what?"

"I'm telling you, 'so what?' is where our democracy goes to die," Maloney said.

Maloney urged fellow committee member Chris Stewart, R-Utah, also appearing on ABC, to join him in calling for the State Department to release all emails, notes, call records and calendar items that the committee has subpoenaed.

Stewart replied, "You bet, because I don't think there's anything there at all that is going to implicate the president." He added that in return, the Democrats should call for testimony from Joe Biden and the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry.

Trump, meanwhile, continued to tweet and retweet a steady stream of commentary from supporters as he bashed "The Crazed, Do Nothing Democrats" for "turning Impeachment into a routine partisan weapon."

"That is very bad for our Country, and not what the Founders had in mind!!!!" he wrote.

He also tweeted a doctored video exchange between Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Jordan, in which Schiff said he did not know the identity of the whistleblower. The clip has been altered to show Schiff wearing a referee's uniform and loudly blowing a whistle.

PROTECTING WITNESSES

In her CBS interview, Pelosi vowed to protect the whistleblower, whom Trump has said should be forced to come forward despite long-standing whistleblower protections.

"I will make sure he does not intimidate the whistleblower," Pelosi said of Trump. "This is really important, especially when it comes to intelligence, that someone who would be courageous enough to point out truth to power and then through the filter of a Trump-appointed inspector general who found it of urgent concern ... and then took it to the next steps."

Trump has drawn fire for his treatment of one of the witnesses, the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump criticized by tweet as she was testifying last week.

Trump's actions prompted accusations of witness intimidation from Democrats and even some criticism from Republicans, who have been largely united in their defense of Trump.

"I think, along with most people, I find the president's tweet generally unfortunate," said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, on CNN's State of the Union.

Still, he insisted that such a tweet is "certainly not impeachable, and it's certainly not criminal. And it's certainly not witness intimidation," even if Yovanovitch said she felt intimidated.

Stewart, the congressman from Utah, said Trump "communicates in ways that sometimes I wouldn't," but he dismissed the significance of Trump's tweets.

"If your basis for impeachment is going to include a tweet, that shows how weak the evidence for that impeachment is," he said on This Week.

The backlash didn't stop Trump from lashing out at another witness, this time the Pence aide Williams. He urged her in a Sunday tweet to "meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don't know & mostly never even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!"

Information for this article was contributed by Jill Colvin and Hope Yen of The Associated Press; by Steve Geimann, Mark Niquette, Hailey Waller, Tony Czuczka and Ben Bain of Bloomberg News; and by Felicia Sonmez, Karoun Demirjian and Douglas MacMillan of The Washington Post.

A Section on 11/18/2019

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