“Another day of secret meetings, secret hearings, secret transcripts, a secret whistleblower, non-whistleblower, hearsay whistleblower, all because of a phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine,” he said. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) was “calling in witness after witness but only behind closed doors, without real Republican due process at all to speculate on the president’s intentions.”
Earlier that day, the witness who offered testimony to impeachment investigators was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a member of the National Security Council who’d participated on the July 25 call referred to by Hannity. Last week, investigators released a transcript of Vindman’s testimony, more than 8,000 lines of text in which he told members of Congress what he’d been privy to in his role.
What that transcript also allows us to do is see how unbalanced it was for Republicans, the extent to which Democrats dominated the questioning. We went through it line-by-line (as you can, should you wish), categorizing what was being asked and answered depending on who asked it. We set aside contextual issues or objections as a separate category of engagement and identified the relatively few instances in which a speaker couldn’t be identified or information was redacted.
The result looked like this:
Following the introductory discussion and Vindman’s opening statement, there were five timed segments over the course of the day in which both Democrats and Republicans had the floor.
The flow is pretty obvious visually. Each party took turns asking questions of Vindman, led by the Democrats. Generally, questioning was delegated to staff attorneys for either the Democratic majority or the Republican minority. At some points, members interjected with questions, as did Schiff.
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There were a number of verbal scuffles between Republicans and Democrats, generally when Republicans had the floor. Many of those debates were instigated by objections from Vindman’s attorney. Several were driven by the Republicans’ interest in asking questions about the whistleblower.
Overall, though, the distribution of the questioning is obvious. About 44 percent of the transcript is made up of questions or answers from Democratic members or staff. About 41 percent is from the Republicans. The remaining 15 percent was discussion and objections.