Tuesday, November 12, 2019

The week's scheduled public hearings

Wednesday: William Taylor (US ambassador to Ukraine)
Wednesday: George Knet (State Dept deputy ass't secretary)
Friday: Marie Yovanovitch (smeared, ousted US ambassador to Ukraine)

Democrats plan to hold two weeks of hearings in the House Intelligence Committee and will later hold hearings in the Judiciary Committee, which will draft any articles of impeachment.

  Politico
Do you suppose they'll move Jordan onto the Judiciary Committee, too?
Republicans are allowed to request their own witnesses, but it’s ultimately up to Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff to approve them. Some of the GOP suggestions are explosive, including Hunter Biden and the anonymous whistleblower who sounded the alarm about Trump and Ukraine. Schiff has effectively shut the door on those asks, saying the committee “will not serve ... as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the president pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit.”

[...]

Democrats, mindful that high-stakes hearings can quickly deteriorate into messy partisan free-for-alls, have attempted to streamline the standard hearing process to ensure an uninterrupted flow of questions.

[...]

[The Intelligence Committee] has the fewest lawmakers in the House, with 13 Democrats and nine Republicans, and most aren’t known for grandstanding or theatrics — though there are a few notable exceptions.
Including one of the biggest grandstanders, Jim Jordan, who is a member of the Oversight Committee that the Republicans have put temporarily on Intel so he can cause a stink there.
The process of questioning witnesses will also be centralized. Schiff and his GOP counterpart, Rep. Devin Nunes, will control the majority of the questioning and likely defer to staff lawyers for much of it.

[...]

Schiff and Nunes also will each have the power to ask an unlimited number of questions to witnesses, for up to 45 minutes at a time. During these periods, only they and their staff may participate. The rank-and-file lawmakers on the committee will also be given five minutes apiece to ask witnesses questions.

[...]

Trump and Republicans also have demanded that the president’s lawyers and White House counsel be permitted to participate, a request Democrats have rejected. However, Trump will be allowed to be represented when the Judiciary Committee drafts impeachment articles in the next few weeks.
I don't know why they'd let him do that. Defendants get represented at trial, not during prosecutor deliberations about whether and what to charge.
Schiff is expected to yield much of his time to [Daniel] Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who serves as the Intelligence Committee’s director of investigations. Goldman spent 10 years as a federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York.

Goldman was featured prominently in the deposition transcripts, and he’ll likely play a similarly outsize role during the public hearings.

[...]

In addition to Goldman, Schiff is likely to tap [Daniel] Noble for public questioning, too.
Double Daniels.
Noble also worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. He specialized in cybercrime and organized crime prosecutions.

Noble was brought on to the Intelligence Committee in March as a senior counsel and has been intimately involved in the private questioning of witnesses throughout the impeachment inquiry.

[...]

Jordan is a fierce questioner and fire-breathing defender of Trump — but until last week, he wasn’t even on the Intelligence Committee. But his consistently aggressive defense of the president pushed House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy to install Jordan on the panel (and remove a less prominent Republican member [Rick Crawford]) and give him a chance to put his tenacity on display.

[...]

In moving Rep. Jim Jordan to the Intelligence Committee, Republicans also brought over his chief counsel for the Oversight Committee, Steve Castor. Sources familiar with GOP planning say Nunes will yield much of his time during the 45-minute round of questioning to Castor, who has endeared himself to GOP lawmakers for sharply grilling witnesses during the depositions.

[...]

[Minority chair Devin] Nunes has emerged in recent years as Trump’s most hardline defender in Congress, one of the few lawmakers who, when Republicans previously controlled the House, was willing to use his gavel to undermine the investigations of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. He’s been a Fox News fixture, insisting that Trump is the victim of coup attempts and conspiracies.

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