Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) blasted House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) at Wednesday’s impeachment inquiry hearing for claiming in his opening statement that the facts were “undisputed.”
“They are absolutely disputed,” Gohmert declared, “and the evidence is a bunch of hearsay on hearsay.”
Gohmert went on to argue that the Judiciary Committee should call a variety of fact witnesses, rather than merely accepting the report of the House Intelligence Committee, which reviewed only the witnesses Democrats had allowed thus far.
The Intelligence Committee report, released by chairman Adam Schiff less than 24 hours before the Judiciary Committee hearing, made assertions similar to Nadler’s: “Those watching the impeachment hearings might have been struck by how little discrepancy there was between the witnesses called by the Majority and Minority. Indeed, most of the facts presented in the pages that follow are uncontested.”
However, Republicans and Democrats have frequently clashed over the facts — particularly whether there was any “quid pro quo” in President Donald Trump’s request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate possible Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, as as the circumstances in which former Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor with jurisdiction over an investigation into Burisma, a gas company on whose board his son, Hunter Biden, served.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.