restate it again. i appreciate the ranking member that they had the opportunity to call witnesses. to turn around and suggest that the rules are being trampled and the rules are dead ignores everything that you just laid out. 50 more than 50 years ago more than 50 years ago the joint committee on the organization of congress made clear in their report to the house and senate that it is normal proper sired for witnesses representing both sides of the issue to give testimony at committee hearings and that s where the rule comes from. and that s what s happened. the ranking member acknowledged it. you would have liked more witnesses. there is no right to a separate day. the rule makes clear they have the right to call witnesses and there were witnesses called. they were minority witnesses on december 4th.
there were some quite a few depositions that were private. but there was a lot of public testimony it wasn t before the judiciary committee, it was before the senate watergate committee. as you ll recall the president s counsel, john dean, appeared and testified there was a cancer on the presidency and a number of other revelation that there was a recording system in the white house. all of that happened in the senate. and the fact that it happened in the senate didn t mean that the judiciary committee didn t know about it. the whole country knew about it. and took notice of it. there is only a few members of this committee that were on the judiciary committee during the clinton impeachment. i was one of them. ms. jackson lee and mr. nadler were as well as mr. sensenbrenner and the gentleman from ohio. we had a report from mr. starr.
employer, his boss, came out and characterized his report before he could even discuss it. in the instance of the proceedings of 1998, the congress received a report just as both our friends on the other side of the aisle and we in the majority received reports from the impeachment inquiry committees who were investigatory committees. they did their work, yes, in a classified setting as i imagine both mr. starr and mr. jere os key had to do. they were like prosecutors. had witnesses that were not in the public. and then, of course, there were full public hearings, 17 witnesses, firsthand witnesses who heard the call and testified not on any second hand knowledge but firsthand
them. because president trump s conduct overlaps with criminal acts. let s start with criminal bribery. 18 u.s. code 201b2a. relevant here criminal bribery occurs when a public official demands or seeks anything of value personally in return for being influenced in the performance of an act and must carry them out corruptly. president trump demanded and sought the announcement and conduct of politically-motivated investigations by president zelensky. anything of value personally. for the purposes of anti-bribery law anything of value has been interpr eted by the courts to carry out the congressional purpose of punishing the abuse of public office. in return for being influenced the third requirement, as the intel committee report demonstrated president trump
a country had satisfied those requirements around corruption and the department of defense released that report. nowhere between the time that donald trump withheld aid and the time that he released that aid was there an additional assessment required or done. in fact, the department of defense decided they didn t need to do another assessment because they had already done the assessment. so at the end of the day i have only two questions for my colleagues on the other side. these are the two questions. forget about president trump. forget about president trump. will any one of my colleagues on the other side say that it is an abuse of power to condition aid to condition aid on official acts? forget about president trump. forget about president trump. is any one of my colleagues