House Democrats are moving aggressively to wrap up their historic, weeks-long investigation into President Trump before 2020, potentially setting up a climactic vote to impeach him just before Christmas.
The timeline has come into sharper focus as Democrats have made a series of critical moves signaling they are shutting down the closed-door fact-finding phase of the inquiry and shifting now to Phase 2: making the case for impeachment to the American public, according to The Hill.
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Congressional investigators, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), appear to have wrapped up the last of 15 private depositions of current and former Trump administration officials. This week they began publishing thousands of pages of transcripts from those interviews.
And next week, Democrats will launch the first public, televised hearings of their nearly seven-week-long impeachment inquiry, calling three career foreign service officials who have already testified that Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and their allies were seeking a brazen quid pro quo with Ukraine.
"I think, without being hasty, again, but being expeditious and deliberative, that the House ought to set for themselves a target of having dealt with this in the Intelligence Committee and Foreign Affairs and Oversight and the Judiciary Committee and on the floor by Christmas," Rep. Denny Heck (D-Wash.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, told CNN's "The Situation Room" on Thursday night.
"That's a tough schedule. But it's a doable schedule, given where we're at and all the work that's been done thus far," Heck said.
