Dear Commons Community,
The Democrats on the three House committees running the impeachment investigation released a 300-page report detailing a case that President Trump abused his power by withholding a White House meeting and military aid as he pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. The report, which also accuses Mr. Trump of obstructing the impeachment inquiry, incorporates more than two months of testimony from diplomats and administration officials, in addition to call records and other evidence discovered by the committees conducting the inquiry. The witnesses provided “overwhelming evidence of his misconduct,” the report says of Mr. Trump. A key finding is that a senior Ukrainian official told The Times that she and others knew about the hold on military aid in July, acknowledging for the first time that officials in Kyiv were aware of the freeze during the Trump administration’s pressure campaign. She said advisers to Ukraine’s president sought to keep that fact from surfacing to avoid getting drawn into the American impeachment debate.
Below are four key takeaways from the report courtesy of the New York Times.
Impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee begin today!
Tony
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| 1. Phone records provide new evidence of Rudy Giuliani’s involvement.
While the report offers few new revelations, it includes extensive call records produced by AT&T and Verizon showing how frequently Mr. Giuliani was in touch with people involved in a smear campaign against Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, including more than a dozen calls with the White House in the two days before her removal in late April.
Among those implicated: John Solomon, a columnist for The Hill; Lev Parnas, an indicted business associate of Mr. Giuliani; the Office of Management and Budget, the agency responsible for overseeing the military aid; Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee; and a mysterious “-1,” a possible reference to Mr. Trump himself. |
| 2. Investigators home in on the White House’s involvement in the pressure campaign, making over 100 references to the White House chief of staff.“Our investigation determined that this telephone call was neither the start nor the end of President Trump’s efforts to bend U.S. foreign policy for his personal gain,” the report says, referring to Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. “Rather, it was a dramatic crescendo within a monthslong campaign driven by President Trump.”
The authors repeatedly cite the news conference by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, in which he openly told reporters that Mr. Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on the political investigations. It was that moment, among other incidents, when Mr. Trump “became the author of his own impeachment inquiry,” Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote in the report’s preface. |
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| 3. Over 90 pages of the report are committed to Mr. Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry.
The report says that Mr. Trump “ordered and implemented a campaign to conceal his conduct from the public,” which led to 12 current or former officials’ refusal to appear, 10 of whom were subpoenaed. “Donald Trump is the first and only president in American history to openly and indiscriminately defy all aspects of the Constitutional impeachment process,” the report reads. |
| 4. The report makes over 100 references to the Constitution
“The Founding Fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment,” investigators wrote in a summary of the report. In the preface, Mr. Schiff wrote that “we may be witnessing a collision between the power of a remedy meant to curb presidential misconduct and the power of faction determined to defend against the use of that remedy on a president of the same party.”
Mr. Schiff also appealed to historical precedent, warning that Mr. Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry means that “any future president will feel empowered to resist an investigation into their own wrongdoing, malfeasance, or corruption, and the result will be a nation at far greater risk of all three.” |
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| 2. Investigators home in on the White House’s involvement in the pressure campaign, making over 100 references to the White House chief of staff.“Our investigation determined that this telephone call was neither the start nor the end of President Trump’s efforts to bend U.S. foreign policy for his personal gain,” the report says, referring to Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. “Rather, it was a dramatic crescendo within a monthslong campaign driven by President Trump.”
The authors repeatedly cite the news conference by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, in which he openly told reporters that Mr. Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on the political investigations. It was that moment, among other incidents, when Mr. Trump “became the author of his own impeachment inquiry,” Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote in the report’s preface. |
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| 3. Over 90 pages of the report are committed to Mr. Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry.
The report says that Mr. Trump “ordered and implemented a campaign to conceal his conduct from the public,” which led to 12 current or former officials’ refusal to appear, 10 of whom were subpoenaed. “Donald Trump is the first and only president in American history to openly and indiscriminately defy all aspects of the Constitutional impeachment process,” the report reads. |
| 4. The report makes over 100 references to the Constitution
“The Founding Fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment,” investigators wrote in a summary of the report. In the preface, Mr. Schiff wrote that “we may be witnessing a collision between the power of a remedy meant to curb presidential misconduct and the power of faction determined to defend against the use of that remedy on a president of the same party.”
Mr. Schiff also appealed to historical precedent, warning that Mr. Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry means that “any future president will feel empowered to resist an investigation into their own wrongdoing, malfeasance, or corruption, and the result will be a nation at far greater risk of all three.”
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