THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 21
COMMENT
JUSTTHEFAC TS
D
emocrats in the House of Repre-
sentatives voted last week in near-
unanimity to adopt rules for public im-
peachment hearings; by doing so, they
effectively bound their party to argue
during the 2020 campaign that Donald
Trump is unfit for the Presidency. There
are any number of bases for such an ar-
gument, but the House’s fast-track hear-
ings will focus on the evidence about
Trump’s abuse of his power this year with
regard to Ukraine. The case has been
marked so far by a certain Scorsese-
scripted clarity, catalyzed by the pub-
lished record of a July 25th telephone
conversation between the President and
his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr
Zelensky, during which Trump infamously
asked for “a favor,” by which he meant
investigations of supposed ties between
Democrats and Ukraine during the 2016
campaign, and of Joe Biden and his son,
Hunter, who held a paid board seat at
Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.
The upcoming hearings will explore
more deeply Trump’s conduct before
and after that call. Critical questions
include: How did the nearly yearlong
scheme to go after the Bidens, carried
out by Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s per-
sonal lawyer, distort and undermine
U.S. policy toward Ukraine, an ally
mired in a simmering armed conflict
with Russia? And how rough were
Trump’s tactics—that is, how explic-
itly did he make U.S. support for
Ukraine conditional upon Zelensky’s
willingness to aid his reëlection?
For weeks, the Democrats’ lead in-
vestigator, Representative Adam Schiff,
of California, has been hearing testi-
mony from diplomats and National Se-
curity Council aides in closed sessions.
Its import has not always been easy to
discern. The White House has thrown
up as many obstacles to the investiga-
tion as its lawyers can conceive, and
some current and former Administra-
tion officials summoned to testify have
declined to do so. Yet a remarkable
number of career public servants and
political appointees in possession of
detailed knowledge have defied Trump
and come forward; the Times, the Wash-
ington Post, and other news outlets have
published some of their written state-
ments and reported on their answers
under questioning. From this informa-
tion we have a preview of what the
public hearings are likely to reveal.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
The available testimony makes clear
that diplomats and N.S.C. officials
working on Ukraine have been seeth-
ing over how Trump and Giuliani jeop-
ardized long-standing U.S. policy. As
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vind-
man, an N.S.C. aide, put it in a state-
ment submitted to Schiff ’s committee
last week, “A strong and independent
Ukraine is critical to U.S. national se-
curity interests.” (Vindman received a
Purple Heart for wounds he sustained
while serving in Iraq; after parts of his
testimony became public, the President
denounced him on Twitter, and some
of Trump’s allies on Fox News ques-
tioned the colonel’s patriotism.) Vind-
man and others who have testified de-
scribe themselves as fervent believers in
the U.S. strategy in Ukraine, which pre-
dates Trump and enjoys bipartisan sup-
port; the policy seeks to bolster Ukraine’s
economy and its military, on the ground
that doing so is vital to Europe’s integ-
rity and the containment of Russia. That
so lofty a goal might be debased by Giu-
liani’s machinations to influence U.S.
elections disgusted some of these offi-
cials. One of them, reportedly, was the
hard-line former national-security ad-
viser John Bolton, who, according to a
statement from William Taylor, cur-
rently the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine,
referred to the tactic as a “drug deal.”
Bolton has now been asked to testify.
The testimony to date has also clar-
ified how Trump and his aides manip-
ulated support for Ukraine. The Ad-
ministration sent Taylor to Kiev with a
letter that Trump signed on May 29th,
which promised Zelensky a meeting in
