Pelosi outlines case to impeach
Trump urges GOP to fight, assails ‘phony emoluments clause’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump urged his party to “get tougher and fight” against his impeachment Monday as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., distributed a “fact sheet” outlining what her office called a gross abuse of presidential power, including a “shakedown,” a “pressure campaign” and a “cover up.”
On Monday evening, majority Democrats blocked an effort by House Republicans to censure intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff for his handling of the inquiry.
Democrats have also planned two closed-door depositions this week, including one Tuesday from Bill Taylor, the top official at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. In text messages with other U.S. diplomats, Taylor raised alarms about the White House holding back military aid to Ukraine and pressing for investigations into the 2016 U.S. election and an energy company that employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
House Democrats are adding legal firepower to their ranks as they move from investigation mode to the impeachment process, according to multiple House Democratic officials.
The House Judiciary Committee has added impeachment scholar Joshua Matz, a constitutional law expert and former attorney at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, to its ranks in recent days, according to multiple officials familiar
with the move. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly.
Matz, who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, recently wrote a book, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” with another impeachment scholar Democrats are consulting, Laurence Tribe.
Tribe, while not on staff or being paid, has also become a regular source of advice for House Democrats, particularly for his former students who are now in the thick of the impeachment probe: Schiff and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., both of whom studied under Tribe at Harvard Law School.
Tribe has been a vocal critic of Trump both in writing and on TV and boasts more than 600,000 Twitter followers.
The House Judiciary Committee declined to comment, as did Tribe. Matz could not be reached for comment.
Multiple officials familiar with House Democrats’ preparations for impeachment said there is not much time to hire new lawyers given how fast Democratic leaders hope to move on impeachment. Pelosi and her top lieutenants still hope to have impeachment finished by the end of the year, though that timeline seems increasingly tricky with Democrats in town only for six more weeks this year.
The Judiciary panel at the start of the year brought in two heavy-hitting lawyers, who are still in place and expected to help guide the panel through impeachment: Norman Eisen and Barry Berke.
Also Monday, Trump decried “this phony emoluments clause” as he continued to defend his nowabandoned decision to host next year’s international Group of Seven summit at a private Miami golf club he owns. Speaking to reporters who were allowed to sit in on his Cabinet meeting, Trump suggested that he was being held to a different standard than other presidents, including some who were also wealthy.
“Other presidents, if you look, other presidents were wealthy, not huge wealth,” he said. “George Washington was actually considered a very, very rich man at the time. But they ran their businesses. George Washington, they say had two desks. He had a presidential desk and a business desk.”
At that point, Trump complained about “you people with this phony emoluments clause.”
Under the emoluments clause of the Constitution, presidents are not permitted to use the office to enrich themselves.
Trump reversed course on holding the G-7 at the Trump National Doral Miami after he was told by conservative allies that Republicans were struggling to defend him on multiple fronts. Democrats had considered adding the alleged emoluments violation to the articles of impeachment they are preparing. Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, fired back against Trump’s remarks about the “phony emoluments clause.”
“You can’t uphold your oath to protect and defend the Constitution if you think it’s phony,” Buttigieg tweeted in response to Trump’s quote Monday.
Buttigieg was part of a chorus of Democratic lawmakers who ridiculed Trump on his “phony” comment — including Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who tweeted: “My instinct is, and I amnot kidding, that someone just explained the emoluments clause to him, possibly for the first time.”
Several Democrats ridiculed Trump on his “phony” comment — including Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who tweeted:
“My instinct is, and I am not kidding, that someone just explained the emoluments clause to him, possibly for the first time.”
Earlier, Trump praised Democratic unity on the impeachment inquiry and said his party needs “to get tougher and fight.”
“The two things they have: They’re vicious, and they stick together,” Trump said of Democrats during a Cabinet meeting. “They don’t have Mitt Romney in their midst. They don’t have people like that.”
Trump was referring to the Republican senator from Utah who has called Trump’s efforts to press for foreign investigations of his political rivals “wrong and appalling.”
“Republicans have to get tougher and fight,” Trump said during the Cabinet meeting. “We have some that are great fighters, but they have to get tougher and fight because the Democrats are trying to hurt the Republican Party for the election, which is coming up, where we’re doing very well.”
Pelosi’s office released a four-page “fact sheet” citing the most compelling evidence of what Democrats have cast as a gross abuse of power by Trump.
The citations are divided into categories: “the shakedown,” “the pressure campaign” and “the cover up.”
As evidence of a “shakedown,” the fact sheet cites quotes from the rough transcript from Trump’s July call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which it says “paints a damning picture of Trump abusing his office by pressing a foreign government to interfere in our 2020 elections.” Trump, the document contends, “has betrayed his oath of office, betrayed our national security and betrayed the integrity of our elections for his own personal political gain.” The evidence of a “pressure campaign” includes several texts from State Department officials, including one in which Taylor says, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
As of evidence of a “cover up,” the document points to the complaint filed by the whistleblower that sparked the impeachment inquiry.
In it, the anonymous U.S. intelligence official asserts that senior White House officials “intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call” and loaded the transcript into “a separate electronic system . . . used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”