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Strap In for a Wild Week as the Impeachment Inquiry Goes Public
With two days of public hearings in the House, the American public will finally get a full view of Trump’s corruption
The impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s corrupt Ukraine extortion conspiracy begins this week, and it’s going to be one hell of a show.
Washington is girding its loins for a big, ugly fight that presages an even bigger and uglier fight to come. After more than a month of investigations and closed-door depositions produced damning new information, the House impeachment inquiry will feature live testimony on Wednesday and Friday.
We’re in a whole new ball game.
There have been few tectonic moments where the constitutional boundaries, powers, and limits of the branches of our government are tested, but we’re in one now. The future of the Trump presidency, the balance of powers, and the rule of law all hang in the balance.
How this week of spectacle turns out depends on the answers to eight key questions.
What happens when Americans know more about Ukraine?
Millions of Americans are about to get their first real taste of the Ukraine story, told by eyewitnesses who can’t all be bluntly smeared as liberal shills. They’ll see the story told for the first time with documents, timelines, and testimony under the lights. Expect blanket news coverage from the major outlets, though if Fox decides to ignore the hearings, I imagine we’ll be seeing coverage of Hillary’s emails, water-skiing squirrels, and the newly discovered war on Thanksgiving.
Most Americans outside of the Twitter/cable bubble know something serious happened with Trump and Ukraine, but they’re about to be educated more broadly on Trump’s comically inept scheme to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for political gain, the deployment of back-channel emissaries like Gordon Sondland and Rudy Giuliani, and the subsequent conspiracy to cover it all up, and the full embrace of a ludicrous conspiracy theory as a justification for this scheme.
The information from the closed-door hearings to date has already moved the electorate…
