Impeachment inquiry enters new phase
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump this week faces a dilemma central to the impeachment inquiry against him.
He could opt to have his legal team take part in the next phase, a move that some of the president’s backers warn would grant the impeachment proceedings greater legitimacy. Or the White House could continue to reject any involvement, potentially allowing key elements of a Democratic-crafted narrative of official misconduct by the president to go largely unchallenged.
An early indication of Trump’s leanings came Sunday evening, when the White House said it would not take part in the first public hearing this week by the House Judiciary Committee. In the longer term, whichever course the president chooses will carry risks for both sides in historic proceedings that have so far broken down almost exclusively along partisan lines.
Congressional investigators have been examining whether Trump abused his power by trying to strongarm the neophyte president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, into announcing investigations meant to damage Joe Biden, a potential 2020 challenger, and to undermine the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Now, as lawmakers return from their Thanksgiving recess, the inquiry will pivot to weighing potential articles of impeachment against Trump. If the process moves on to a vote by the full House of Representatives, he could ultimately find himself only the third U.S. president ever to be impeached.
At incendiary campaignstyle rallies across the country, Trump has repeatedly railed against the impeachment proceedings as a sham, a hoax and a witch hunt. A typical scenario unfolded at a rally last week in Sunrise, Fla., when he basked in crowd chants of an expletive he used to characterize the House probe, and accused “radical Democrats” of trying to overturn the last election.
Back in Washington, the House Intelligence Committee in recent weeks has heard from a dozen fact witnesses, all current or previous Trump administration officials, about the irregular foreign-policy channel set up by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and the unexplained holdup of $400 million in security aid to help Kyiv in its war with Russian-backed fighters in eastern Ukraine, Europe’s only active battlefront.