The GOP committee members outlined “four key pieces of evidence” in a memo Monday that they believe are “fatal” to the Democrats’ accusations of impeachable offenses against President Donald Trump.
The memo was drawn up by top Republicans from several committees that are all involved in the president’s impeachment investigation. The Republican leaders began the memo, which was circulated to GOP committee members Monday night, chastised Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, for improperly conducting the impeachment inquiry from his “Capitol basement bunker.”
“The fact-finding is all unclassified, so the closed-door process is purely for information control,” the memo said. “This arrangement has allowed Chairman Schiff — who has already publicly fabricated evidence and misled Americans about his interactions with the anonymous whistleblower — to selectively leak cherry-picked information to help paint misleading public narratives while, at the same time, placing a gag order on Republican Members.”
With all of the secrecy and untruths surrounding this unprecedented presidential impeachment activity, the memo was crafted when the inquiry changed to a public hearing in order to update all of the Republican members on key testimony and evidence that was learned from the Democrat’s numerous closed-door testimonies.
The memo outlined four key pieces of evidence, with the first being the July 25 phone call summary which shows no conditionality or evidence of pressure at all from President Trump to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. In addition, the Ukrainian government was not aware of a hold on U.S. security assistance at the time of the call. And finally, the fact that both President Zelensky and President Trump have said there was no pressure on the call, should have resolved the entire issue. If that doesn’t, then the fact that President Trump met with President Zelensky and U.S. security assistance is documented as being given to Ukraine in September 2019 – noting that both of these activities occurred without Ukraine investigating the Biden’s or any other of President Trump’s political rivals.
There was also a section in the Republican memo that was titled, “Background.” This section was created to offer context to accurately “assess the President’s state of mind” during the phone call with the Ukrainian president.
“Trump had a deep-seated, genuine and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine and U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid” due to its “history of pervasive corruption” which operated “independent of and preceding any mention” of Ukraine’s alleged 2016 election interference and Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma.”
The president continues to call the impeachment talks a “witch hunt” and says that the telephone conversation with Ukraine that is in question, was a “perfect” call. The majority of Republican lawmakers support the president and call what the Democrats are doing a disgrace.
The public impeachment hearing began on Wednesday with the first witness and things did not go too well for the Democrats. Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, seemed to benefit the Republicans more than the Democrats. The hearings are scheduled to continue this week.
