Sen. Ted Cruz would support calling the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower to testify in the upcoming Senate impeachment trial if that is what President Trump’s legal defense team wants.
“I think calling the so-called whistleblower as a witness would be a perfectly reasonable step for the president’s defense team to take, and if the president wants to call the whistleblower, the Senate should allow him to do so,” the Texas Republican told the Washington Examiner.
The intelligence community whistleblower’s testimony could interest the White House because his anonymous complaint about a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sparked the House Democrats’ impeachment effort.
Eric Ciaramella, alleged to be the whistleblower, is a career CIA analyst and was Ukraine director on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, then was acting senior director for European and Russian affairs early in the Trump administration. Ciaramella, 33, worked closely with former Vice President Joe Biden and was cited in a key passage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Cruz said he’d advocate for reciprocity regarding possible additional witnesses, saying if Democrats wanted to call former national security adviser John Bolton to testify, then Republicans could call Hunter Biden, the son of 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, both of whom were mentioned during Trump’s call with Zelensky.
Trump asked Ukraine’s leader to look into a debunked CrowdStrike conspiracy theory and possible Ukrainian election interference in 2016 as well as allegations of corruption related to Biden and his son, who held a lucrative position on the board of the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings.
“Now, the Senate has to approve any subpoena, so they can’t be abusive in their requests, but I don’t think it’s our place to dictate to the president and the White House defense team which witnesses they should call, if any,” Cruz said. “I think that is a decision that should be made in the first instance by the president’s legal team.”
Trump’s defense team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow, hasn’t publicly declared whether it wants witnesses.
“I think there is widespread agreement among the [Republican] conference that if we were to go down the road of additional witnesses, both sides would be allowed to call witnesses,” Cruz said.
The two articles of impeachment passed by the House charge the president with soliciting Ukraine’s help to interfere in the 2020 election while withholding military aid and with obstructing the congressional investigation into the matter. Trump insists his call with Zelensky was “perfect,” and his defenders say he committed no impeachable offenses.
