What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

One of the arguments you will likely hear from Republicans today is that Democrats are not conducting this impeachment inquiry in a proper, constitutional way. That isn’t true. In a nutshell, the constitution gives the House broad authority in how it wants to conduct an impeachment, but if you want to dig deeper into the law and history of impeachment we did a whole podcast on it.

Well, Nathaniel, the Maguire hearing was before the Oct. 31 vote to formalize the impeachment process. So that’s an important distinction. But also at that point, the Democrats hadn’t conducted their own investigation and weren’t really trying to present evidence against Trump. That’s what’s happening now — these hearings are the public version of testimony that’s been happening behind closed doors for several weeks.

Something that’s confusing me (and I can’t be alone in that, so I’ll ask it publicly): Everyone is billing this as the start of the “public hearing phase” of the impeachment investigation. But we’ve had a couple public hearings on this topic before — like when Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified in late September. What gives?