Schiff, Nunes Offer Opening Statements During Impeachment Hearings

Schiff, Nunes Offer Opening Statements During Impeachment Hearings
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) (L) and Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) during the first public hearings held by the House Intelligence Committee as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington on Nov. 13, 2019. (Saul Loeb/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Jack Phillips
11/19/2019
Updated:
11/19/2019

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) provided opening statements in the third day of impeachment hearings amid an inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Schiff, in his opening statement, said that Trump pressed “a foreign leader to announce an investigation into his political rival, President Trump put his own personal and political interests above those of the nation.”

He was referring to a July 25 phone call where Trump asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to look into alleged election interference and former Vice President Joe Biden and his on. The hearings on Tuesday include Jennifer Williams and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, officials who worked in the National Security Council.

Meanwhile, Nunes blasted the mainstream media’s coverage of the impeachment hearings.

“If you watched the impeachment hearings last week, you may have noticed a disconnect between what you actually saw and the mainstream media accounts describing it. What you saw were three diplomats, who dislike the president’s Ukraine policy, discussing second-hand and third-hand conversations about their objections. Meanwhile, they admitted they had not talked to the president about these matters, and they were unable to identify any crime or impeachable offense the president committed,” he said.

All this, he argued, serves to undermine Americans’ faith in media outlets.

“The media have fully accepted the Democrats’ stunning reversal on the need for the Whistleblower to testify to this committee. When the Democrats were insisting on his testimony, the media wanted it too,” Nunes remarked.

Nunes noted that Democrats and media outlets have dismissed reports of alleged election interference on behalf of Ukraine during the 2016 election.

“Since the Democrats switched from Russia to Ukraine for their impeachment crusade, [former Hill reporter John] Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative, and so the media is furiously smearing and libeling Solomon,” he said. “In fact, the publication The Hill told its staff yesterday it would conduct a review of Solomon’s Ukraine reporting. Coincidentally, the decision came just three days after a Democrat on this committee told a Hill writer that she would stop speaking to The Hill because it had run Solomon’s stories, and she urged the writer to relay her concerns to Hill management.”

Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter with 15 years experience who started as a local New York City reporter. Having joined The Epoch Times' news team in 2009, Jack was born and raised near Modesto in California's Central Valley. Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/jackphillips5
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