By
Aaron Blake
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/04/early-takeaways-judiciary-committees-first-impeachment-hearing/Aaron Blake
Senior political reporter, writing for The Fix
Dec. 4, 2019 at 3:28 p.m. EST
The House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings focused almost exclusively on Ukraine. That was the new information, after all, and that’s what the witnesses could speak to.
But at the start of Wednesday’s hearing, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) seemed to indicate he was inclined to include something else in the impeachment articles: the obstruction-of-justice portions of the Mueller investigation.
Nadler’s opening statement accused Trump of obstructing both the Ukraine probe and the Russia investigation, and it included plenty on the latter, in a way that suggests it was a calculated choice.
“When his own Justice Department tried to uncover the extent to which a foreign government had broken our laws,” Nadler said of the Russia probe, “President Trump took extraordinary and unprecedented steps to obstruct the investigation, including ignoring subpoenas, ordering the creation of false records, and publicly attacking and intimidate witnesses. Then, as now, this administration’s level of obstruction is without precedent.”