What Went Down On Day 3 Of The Trump Impeachment Hearings

Yeah, Amelia, I would say that the “coverup” hasn’t been a big part of these hearings so far. Questions and testimony have been more focused the act of pressuring Ukraine. That’s a difference from, say, Watergate.

One thing that’s standing out to me as questioning shifts over to Republicans: Vindman spoke strongly about the July 25 call and the push for investigations, but he also didn’t give the answers Democrats were pressing for at other moments. He didn’t characterize the omission of “Burisma” from the transcript as part of a coverup, for example, and also offered a fairly innocuous explanation for why the call summary was put on the secure server. That might be frustrating for Democrats, but it could also underscore his credibility as a witness who’s just trying to describe things as he saw them.

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.