What Went Down On Day 3 Of The Trump Impeachment Hearings

Another strand of the Ukraine interference theory involves the “black ledger,” which refers to off-the-books records of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work for ex-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014 amid allegations of corruption. When the records became public, Manafort was forced to resign.

In the hearings so far, Republicans have tried to trace responsibility for Manafort’s ouster back to an unproven conspiracy between Ukrainian bureaucrats and Democratic Party. To do this, they’ve leaned heavily on a 2017 Politico investigation that reported that a Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa was investigating ties between Manafort and Yanukovych in 2016 and was in touch with Ukrainian officials in the process. It’s very unclear, though, how much help the Ukrainians actually gave Chalupa, who has said the Ukrainian-interference theory is a distraction promoted by the Kremlin. And there’s no evidence that the DNC used the information Chalupa found, or that there was any kind of concerted effort within the Ukrainian government was trying to help Hillary Clinton. Indeed, the fact that Republicans are continuing to lean on an article that’s almost three years old suggests that there isn’t more to the story.

“None of these are trick questions,” Nunes says. It would appear, then, that Nunes is just trying to talk about the Bidens on TV right now.

Nunes goes straight in on Burisma and the Bidens. Williams’ answer, again and again: I was not working in the White House at the time.