US President Donald Trump yesterday faced the most perilous challenge of his three-year term as public hearings convened as part of the impeachment probe against him opened under the glare of the TV cameras.
Democrats in the US House of Representatives plan to prove over several weeks of hearings that Trump abused his office by seeking Ukraine’s help for his presidential re-election campaign and sought to extort his Kiev counterpart into finding dirt on a Democratic rival, former US vice president Joe Biden.
Trump says the inquiry is “corrupt” and “illegal,” and maintains he did nothing wrong.
“Democrats in Washington would rather pursue outrageous hoaxes and delusional witch hunts, which are going absolutely nowhere. Don’t worry about it,” Trump said in a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday.
However, the probe threatens to make him the third US president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998, and placed on trial in the Senate for possible removal from office.
“On the basis of what the witnesses have had to say so far, there are any number of potentially impeachable offenses — including bribery, including high crimes and misdemeanors,” US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told National Public Radio on Tuesday.
Neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted and removed, but in 1974 former US president Richard Nixon resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office for the Watergate scandal.
The hearings are expected to be fiery as a series of government officials take the stand to testify on Trump’s Ukraine machinations during the middle of this year.
Polls show a slim majority of Americans favor impeaching Trump, but they also show that the president’s sizeable voter base rejects the allegations.
Republicans have accused Schiff of an unfair and unconstitutional process, but he said in a letter that he would not put up with attempts to hijack the hearings.
The inquiry “will not serve as venues for any member to further the same sham investigations into the Bidens or into debunked conspiracies about 2016 US election interference,” he said.
Democrats have amassed evidence that Trump sought to leverage Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s desire for a meeting between the two leaders and for about US$391 million in aid to get Ukraine to find dirt on Biden.
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
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