Trump impeachment: House prepares for crucial vote amid whistleblower row – live | US news

Rounds of charged exchanges and fist-pounding rants did little to lift the air inevitability that surrounded Thursday’s hearing. The battle lines were drawn long ago and the outcome was all-but assured.

Before the end of the day, the Democrats on the committee would almost certainly vote to send articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the House floor. Republicans would almost certainly and uniformly oppose it.

Throughout the morning, lawmakers defaulted to the same, familiar arguments they’ve been making for five weeks. Democrats argued that the case before the committee was crystal clear and that they had a duty to hold the president for his corrupt actions. Republicans argued that Democrats were blinded by their hatred of Trump, who, they contend publicly, did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine.

There was an agreement that “facts matter”. But there wasn’t an agreement on the facts, and they went round and round debating them. Republicans twisted testimony and wrongly asserting that Ukraine was not aware that the US had withheld military aid as Trump pressured the country’s new president to open investigations into his political rivals. Democrats sought to correct the record with little hope of changing their minds.

There were flickers of drama, however. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who has participated in three modern impeachment investigations, refuted Republicans’ claim that the process had been less fair than the Republican-led impeachment investigations of Bill Clinton.

Rep. Steve Chabot, a Republican, said that the “biggest difference in the Clinton impeachment and this one is that President Clinton committed a crime, perjury.” By contrast, he said, Trump hasn’t committed a crime.

“I would just like to note that the argument that somehow lying about a sexual affair is an abuse of presidential power, but the misuse of presidential power to get a benefit somehow doesn’t matter,” she said. “If it’s lying about sex, we could put Stormy Daniels’s case ahead of us. We don’t believe that’s a high crime and misdemeanor. No. And it is not before us. And it should not be for us, because it’s not an abuse of presidential power.”

Trump’s former personal lawyer has said that he was directed by Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, to pay the Daniels, a pornographic actor, $130,000 to keep quiet about her 2006 affair with Trump. Trump has denied the affair.

Unsurprisingly, the committee rejected an amendment by Rep. Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s most loyal defenders, to remove the first article of impeachment from the draft resolution. During debate over a separate amendment, Rep. Matt Gaetz introduced a resolution that would change the subject of the impeachment inquiry to focus on Hunter Biden and Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company on which he served while his dad was Vice President.

Gaetz, insisting he did not intend to make fun of someone’s addiction, read aloud a passage from a New Yorker article that described Hunter Biden’s efforts to buy drugs. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat, stared at Gaetz, who was arrested for a DUI: “The pot calling the kettle black is not something we should do.”