November 6, 2019

Read Bill Taylor’s Testimony to House Impeachment Investigators

Drip, drip.

Tom Williams/ZUMA

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House impeachment investigators on Wednesday released the transcript of their interview with Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat to Ukraine.

If you need a refresher, Taylor told lawmakers in his closed-door session last month that Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, had informed him that both military assistance to Ukraine and a White House visit for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be withheld until Ukraine announced it was launching an investigation into a company connected to Joe Biden’s son. Text message exchanges provided to lawmakers also revealed that Taylor had described it as “crazy” to withhold the aid.

The release on Wednesday came shortly after House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) announced that public hearings would start next week. Taylor, Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, a top State Department official, are scheduled to kick things off.

We’ll be digging through the most revealing parts of Taylor’s testimony. Until then, you can read the full transcript below:

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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