Republicans storm closed-door hearing as GOP moves to undermine impeachment

US House Republicans have stormed a closed-door hearing to protest the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump as GOP leaders move to undermine the process.

“The fact that Adam Schiff won't even let the press in — you can't even go in and see what's going on in that room," House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters outside the hearing room Wednesday. "Voting members of Congress are being denied access from being able to see what's happening behind these closed doors, where they're trying to impeach the president of the United States with a one-sided set of rules, they call the witnesses.”

A top Defense Department official was testifying about the Ukraine scandal, which involves Trump’s push on Ukraine to run investigations into former Vice President Joe Biedn’s alleged corruption and the 2016 presidential election.

"They crashed the party," said Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.), a member of the Oversight and Reform Committee, one of three House panels leading the impeachment probe.

Another GOP lawmaker accused the process of lacking transparency, an idea also echoed by the GOP leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

“He doesn’t have the guts to come talk to us,” Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said. “He left, he just got up and left. He doesn't have the guts to tell us why we can’t come in the room, why he doesn't want this to be transparent. It’s the biggest facade, biggest farce of my life.”

PressTV-Trump compares impeachment inquiry to 'lynching'

Donald Trump has compared the ongoing impeachment inquiry into him to a “lynching."

While he has distanced himself , McConnell  urged other Republicans to defend Trump amid allegations of his abuse power against a potential 2020 rival as well as attempts to get to the origins of the so-called Russia probe.

“What is clear and not in dispute... is the process in the House, to which the president is being subjected, is totally unprecedented and totally unfair,” McConnell told reporters after a private lunch meeting Tuesday.

He pointed to previous efforts to impeach other presidents, trying to single out this one.

“Speaker Albert laid out procedural guidelines during the Nixon episode — Speaker Gingrich during the Clinton impeachment episode — all of which included the kind of basic procedural safeguards that one associates in our country with being treated fairly,” he said. “He feels everybody is free to talk about issues like Ukraine or maybe the Kurds, but to try to conduct an impeachment without any process is very contrary to what happened before… That pretty much sums it up.”

PressTV-‘They stick together,’ Trump praises Dem unity

Under pressure over an impeachment inquiry in the US House, US President Donald Trump is praising unity among Democrats.

This is while he denied that he had ever talked with the president about the scandalous phone call Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he urged him to investigate the Biden, and his son Hunter.

In his defense, Trump had earlier quoted McConnell as saying that the call was “the most innocent phone call that I’ve ever read.”

“He put out a statement that said that was the most innocent phone call he's read, and I spoke to him about it too. He read my phone call with the president of Ukraine. Mitch McConnell — he said, 'That was the most innocent phone call that I've read.' I mean, give me a break,” Trump told reporters on October 3.

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