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Impeachment inquiry holds its first public hearing; rising water in Venice turns deadly.

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The first public hearing

• Acting Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent testified in the first public hearing of the impeachment inquiry before Congress Wednesday. [Washington Post / John Wagner, Felicia Sonmez and Colby Itkowitz]
• Kent and Taylor testified about Trump’s attempts to force Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden in exchange for military aid and a possible White House visit. [Politico / Nahal Toosi, Caitlin Oprysko, and Quint Forgey]
• The biggest news in Taylor’s testimony: He overheard Trump asking Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about progress on “the investigations” a day after Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president. [AP News / Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick]
• One reason the hearings were effective was a change in their format: Each party got 45 minutes to ask questions, allowing them more time to ask follow-ups and build a coherent narrative. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
• Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) denounced the hearings as a “low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to the Mueller investigation. [CNN / Chris Cillizza]
• Here’s one third-grader’s quest to understand the impeachment hearings. [New York Times]
• If you need a refresher on how we got here, here’s the ultimate guide to the impeachment saga. [Vox / Andrew Prokop and Matt Yglesias]

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Floods turn deadly in Venice

• One man is confirmed dead as a result of Venice’s biggest floods in the last 50 years. [CNN / Julia Hollingsworth]
• Venice’s mayor declared a state of emergency after the water level reached about six feet and two inches. [New York Times / Elisabetta Povoledo]
• Over 85 percent of the city is submerged in water and floods only two inches short of the highest recorded floods, in 1966. [NPR / Bill Chappell]
• ”Now the government must listen,” tweeted Mayor Luigi Brugnaro. “These are the effects of climate change. … The costs will be high.” [BBC]
• The combination of high winds and a full moon tide are partly to blame for the record water levels, with another round of high tides expected Thursday. [Vice News / Alex Lubben]

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Miscellaneous

• Continued protests in Iraq are met with crackdowns that are beginning to succeed in creating a powerful atmosphere of fear. [Independent / Louisa Loveluck]
• Google is looking to launch a banking project called Cache that allows users to open checking accounts by next year. [Wall Street Journal / Peter Rudegeair and Liz Hoffman]
• Disney’s streaming services launched despite technical issues, problems they are promising to fix. [TechCrunch / Sarah Perez]
• Do pimple patches actually work? We buy them like they do. [Vox / Cheryl Wischhover]
• The Washington Post’s James Hohmann and Mariana Alfaro analyze Trump’s treatment of Turkey, looking back to his self-admitted “little conflict of interest.” [Washington Post / James Hohmann and Mariana Alfaro]

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Verbatim

“For me, it was just so sad that a foreign embassy in the United States had bullied an American mosque. … The NBA gives me a big platform, and so that’s why I’m trying to be a voice for all those innocent people who don’t have one.” [Boston Celtics center of Turkish origin Enes Kanter on how his vocal criticism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan impacted his attempt to host a free basketball camp]

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Listen to this: Bill and Kent’s congressional adventure

The first public hearing in the impeachment inquiry was held today. Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains the significance of the testimonies given by acting Ambassador William Taylor and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary at the State Department. [Spotify]

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Read more

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Trump is reportedly planning to promote Ken Cuccinelli to a top position at DHS

High School Musical — and its ongoing cultural legacy — explained

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Top US diplomat to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. and Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs George P. Kent arrive to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. | Getty Images

Listen to this episode of Today, Explained for a breakdown of key moments.

The first public hearing in the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump took place today. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee called William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, a State Department official, to testify. Both officials had already participated in closed-door hearings so they weren’t expected to reveal new information. Taylor did disclose a previously unknown phone call with Trump in his opening statement, however, which added another damning testimony to the allegations against the president.

Vox’s Andrew Prokop joins this episode of Today, Explained to share the most important takeaways from the historic public hearing, including Taylor’s new information reveal and Democrats trying a new format. Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Subscribe to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and ART19.

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Sean Rameswaram

I suppose these testimonies today presented an opportunity to take this impeachment inquiry to new places, to reveal any new information. Did either of them take the opportunity to do that?

Andrew Prokop

I didn’t actually expect much new information to be revealed because these two men have both testified behind closed doors extensively and we’ve seen their transcripts. However, Bill Taylor gave me a bit of a surprise in his own opening statement. He revealed new information he had been given just last week. So this took place on the day after Trump’s now infamous phone call with the Ukrainian president, which would make it July 26.

Sean Rameswaram

Was that a big deal?

Andrew Prokop

This is a really big deal. It’s significant because it suggests that Trump was very personally involved in what Sondland was telling the Ukrainians. Now, we had that whole quasi transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, so we knew Trump was demanding these investigations. But there’s been a lot of testimony about what Gordon Sondland was saying and doing to the Ukrainians, that Sondland was telling them, if you want your White House meeting, you have to commit to these investigations. If you want to get your military aid, you have to commit to these investigations. And there was some ambiguity about just, you know, was Sondland freelancing or was he acting at Trump’s behest? And this would certainly suggest that he was in close contact with Trump and he was carrying out Trump’s wishes in doing all this.

Sean Rameswaram

Before any representatives ask questions, it felt very courtroom-y to me in there, it seemed like two lawyers were leading the inquiry. Who were those guys?

Andrew Prokop

These were staff attorneys for each side. Daniel Goldman for the Democrats and Steve Castor for the Republicans. Goldman was pretty disciplined in making Taylor and Kent get their concerns on the record for everything they saw transpire. Castor was a bit more muddled. It often wasn’t really clear what he was trying to get at.

Sean Rameswaram

And after these two staffers, things sort of fell into a familiar pattern. Who was leading the questioning from the Republicans?

Andrew Prokop

Republicans clearly believe their most qualified questioner was Jim Jordan, representative from Ohio, who attempted to really attack and aggressively try to debunk what the witnesses were saying. One point Jordan kept trying to make is that Bill Taylor testified that he came to believe that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine was being held up because they wouldn’t agree to these investigations Trump wanted. And Jordan kept saying, “Well, weren’t you wrong about this? Because the Trump administration did release the aid without Ukraine making any public announcement about the investigations.”

Sean Rameswaram

Didn’t that aid only get released once the whistleblower filed his complaint?

Andrew Prokop

Yeah, it’s still a little murky about why the aid was released, but there are a number of things going on in the days before it was released. The inspector general for the Intelligence Committee had written a letter to Capitol Hill saying there had been this whistleblower complaint that was being withheld from them. Adam Schiff had announced an investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s influence on Ukraine policy. And also John Bolton, the national security adviser, resigned. So it may have been released because the heat was on, because it was threatening to get out and break into the public, what Trump had been trying to do to the Ukrainians.

Sean Rameswaram

What other arguments are the Republicans making?

Andrew Prokop

They kept harping on the idea that Taylor and Kent didn’t have any firsthand contact with President Trump over this. And that is also a bit of a distraction because a lot of the witnesses who did have firsthand contact with Trump on this topic, namely Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo … they have refused to show up and testify. And Republicans don’t seem particularly eager to have them show up and testify.

I would say the exception here has been Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who did have a lot of firsthand contact with Trump on this topic. He did testify, but he is facing problems. He’s already had to go in and update his testimony once. Now, the new information Taylor presented today from his staff member raises further questions about the honesty of someone’s testimony. And Sondland’s lawyer said that this is something that Sondland will address when he shows up for his own public testimony next week.

Sean Rameswaram

This was a big moment for the Republicans. These testimonies have been happening behind closed doors and that’s been a recurring complaint. And today, for the first time ever, they were happening on live TV in front of the whole world. And the best arguments they were making were there is no quid pro quo?

Andrew Prokop

They threw in all sorts of points that Trump’s defenders have been making. Another one is that the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, said that he didn’t feel pressured. And that’s true. Zelensky did say that whether he was being totally forthcoming on that is not so clear. The US is a very powerful country. And Zelensky, it’s true, is not going out in front of the cameras and saying, “Oh my God! I feel like Donald Trump tried to shake me down this summer.” But he has his own diplomatic reasons for doing that.

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Listen to the full episode of Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and ART19.

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Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt is worth $14 billion. | Michael Kovac/Getty Images

Schmidt could save an estimated 240,000 lives instead.

Eric Schmidt on Wednesday made a bold promise: To double the amount of money he and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, spend on charity. What he’s not doing is detailing with any specificity what exactly it is that he’s spending his money on.

Schmidt, the former CEO of Google with a net worth of $14 billion, said he would be committing another $1 billion to charity, part of a new flagship effort to back “talent” around the world. What does that mean?

Eric and Wendy Schmidt have over the last few years assembled a byzantine network of political and philanthropic efforts as they try and give more of their money away (not explicitly more than half as they’re one of the many tech leaders not to sign the Giving Pledge, the commitment to give a majority of their money away). In recent years, especially since stepping down as the executive chairman of Alphabet in 2017, Schmidt has created new organization after new organization, most notably a vehicle called Schmidt Futures, a science-focused philanthropic arm.

Tech philanthropists, often to a fault, like to start their own charitable efforts rather than funding preexisting things with proven track records, like the Gates Foundation. It seems that Schmidt’s existing half-dozen vehicles are not enough for him, which is why he’s launching yet another effort called Rise, which is a partnership between Schmidt Futures and the trust behind the Rhodes Scholarship.

Here’s how Schmidt describes Rise:

“All around the world there are brilliant and visionary people who could do so much more to help their communities and the world if they had the support and opportunity,” he says in his press release. “Rise will find and connect these exceptional young people — and give them individualized support they need — so they can work together to serve others.”

What exactly does that mean? Well, to start, Schmidt didn’t say exactly how much of the $1 billion in new money he’d be spending on the cause.

Schmidt is effectively spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a mentoring network for high schoolers. He’ll choose 100 people from around the world each year to become fellows and part of his “talent network” — which might be similar to a Rhodes Scholarship network, but you know, without a paid-for degree from Oxford. The Schmidts do say that they could offer some scholarships, a summer program before candidates’ final year of high school, along with “online community and learning” and “global connections for impact.”

If that seems vague and full of buzzwords to you, you’re not alone. (Schmidt’s team didn’t return a request for comment.)

This all sounds well and good, on the surface. And frankly, Eric and Wendy Schmidt can do whatever they want with their money. But at a time when billionaire philanthropy is under more scrutiny than ever, along with concerns about the business practices of Google and Schmidt’s own leadership record there, announcements like these can no longer be greeted with automatic applause.

That’s especially so given that there are so many better ways to give money away in 2019 that advocates say would have a tangible, immediate impact on the world. Just as billionaires should not be giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to Ivy League universities, the standard employed by my colleague Dylan Matthews is whether a mega-gift is better for the world than donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, which offers bed nets to needy people in Africa.

Every $4,104 donated to that organization, according to one measure, saves a human life. That’s over 240,000 lives that Eric Schmidt could save instead of spending it on this new philanthropic effort.

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