Nikki Harris
Congressman Don Beyer will hold a town hall on the impeachment investigation into President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine at 7 to 8:30 pm on Thursday, November 21 at the T.C. Williams auditorium.
Beyer will be joined by a guest panel of legal and national security experts to answer questions from the public. The guest panel will be announced in the coming days.
The event will be free and open to the public, but guests will be asked to register in advance so Beyer’s office can track attendance numbers and make sure it is in compliance with the fire code. A link to register will soon be put up on his website. The press will also be required to register in advance.
Beyer’s communications director said, “We don’t have a hard rule about length of time for questions but we will ask people to keep questions to a couple minutes each so we can get as many in as we can.”
The questioning format will replicate the structure Beyer used at a town hall in spring of 2018 about gun violence. Guests will stand in a line on the west side of the auditorium, and then speak at the podium when it is their turn.
Beyer voted last week with a majority of the House to send the impeachment investigation into a new, public phase with open hearings and the release of testimony and transcripts of witness interviews.
The resolution also gives the Republican minority the right to issue subpoenas “with the concurrence of the chair,” meaning that Democrats can prevent any subpoena they deem unwarranted from being issued.
The resolution–which gives the minority more privileges than the impeachment inquiry into President Nixon and President Clinton–followed scrutiny from Republicans about the process of the investigation. No Republicans voted in support of the resolution.
“Republicans applaud as the President obstructs justice and openly argues that he is above the law, and accountable to no one,” Beyer said in a statement Thursday. “That kind of blind partisan allegiance and denial of the rule of law is a straight road to authoritarianism.”
“Like my colleagues, I did not come to Congress to impeach anyone, but every one of us swore to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. We do not honor that oath by turning a blind eye to the President’s betrayal of our country. I applaud my colleagues for passing this resolution to provide for hearings which will establish the truth for the American people.”
Beyer announced his support for an impeachment inquiry into Trump in May, a month after the release of the Mueller Report, which showed “evidence of actions that strongly resemble high crimes and misdemeanors,” Beyer said. “The behavior repeatedly identified in the redacted Mueller Report meets every standard for the classification of ‘obstruction of justice’ of which I am aware.”
Beyer has not attended any of the closed-door witness testimony in the past seven weeks since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the inquiry, as he is not on any of the committees working on the investigation (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee on the Judiciary, Committee on Oversight and Reform, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Financial Services, and the Ways and Means Committee).
