Trump’s confident to face trial in impeachment’s tangled web
At the end of two extraordinary weeks, Donald Trump called the impeachment inquiry ‘total nonsense’. The President’s professed confidence comes despite impeachment witnesses swearing under oath that he withheld aid from Ukraine to press the country to investigate his political rivals. Here, we look at where the inquiry goes next...
THE investigators, the law-makers and the man in the dock have heard enough. With stunning testimony largely complete, the House, the Senate and the President are swiftly moving on to next steps in the historic impeachment inquiry of Donald J Trump.
Mr Trump described the inquiry as a “hoax” and said Democrats in the House of Representatives looked like “fools” during the hearings.
“Frankly, I want a trial,” Mr Trump declared on Friday, and it looks as though he’s going to get it.
Democratic House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s staff and others are compiling the panel’s findings.
By early December, the Judiciary Committee is expected to launch its own high-wire hearings to consider articles of impeachment and a formal recommendation of charges.
A vote by the full House could come by Christmas. A Senate trial would follow in 2020.
Congress’ impeachment inquiry, only the fourth in US history, has stitched together what Democrats argue is a relatively simple narrative, of the President leveraging the office for personal political gain, despite Republicans’ assertions that it’s complex, contradictory and unsupported by first-hand testimony.
House Democrats may yet call additional witnesses first, notably John Bolton, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser.
But Senate Republicans are already looking ahead to their turn, the January trial that would follow House approval of impeachment charges.
They appear to have two major options.
Should they try to dispatch such a trial in short order, which they may not have the votes to do, despite holding 53 seats in the 100-member Senate?
Or should they stretch it out, disrupting the Democrats’ presidential primaries under the assumption it helps more than hurts the Republican Party and Mr Trump?
At this point it seems very unlikely the 45th president will be removed from office.
And he knows it.
“The Republican Party has never been more unified,” Mr Trump declared on Friday, calling into the appropriately named Fox & Friends to talk about his achievements for nearly an hour.
The Democrats have nothing to impeach him on, he claimed, adding that if the House proceeded, its work would come crashing down in the Senate.
He wants that trial, he said.
It all stems from Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s newly elected president.
Mr Trump asked Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favour”, which involved investigating Democrat Joe Biden, and a theory – debunked by US intelligence – that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in America’s 2016 election.
In return, Democrats say, it was made clear to Mr Zelenskiy by others that he would get a coveted Oval Office visit.
And at the same time, Mr Trump was holding up $400m (£311m) in military aid that the eastern European ally relies on to counter Russian aggression at its border.
For Democrats, it amounts to nothing short of a quid pro quo “bribery,” spelled out in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment.
They say they don’t need Bolton or anyone else to further a case they contend was well-established by the White House’s rough transcript of the phone call – the transcript Mr Trump himself implores America to read.
“We Democrats are tired of a President
who is willing to put his own personal interests above the Constitution,” said Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Judiciary Committee member. “I don’t think we should be waiting.”
Mr Trump insists he did nothing wrong.
On Friday he revived the idea of electoral interference from Ukraine, on which he relied to push investigations of Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, who served on the board of a gas company in Ukraine.
His comments came the day after former White House adviser Fiona Hill warned Republicans in the hearings that the claim was a “fictional narrative” that was dangerous for the US and played into the hands of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Uncowed by witnesses who warned against playing into the Russians’ hands, Mr Trump repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukrainians might have hacked the
Democratic National Committee’s network in 2016 and framed Russia for the crime.
Mr Trump said: “They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. I still want to see that server. The FBI has never gotten that server.”
Mr Trump’s claim on Ukraine being behind the 2016 election interference has been discredited by intelligence agencies and his own advisers.
CrowdStrike, an internet security firm based in California, investigated the DNC hack in June 2016 and traced it to two groups of hackers connected to a Russian intelligence service – not Ukraine. The company’s co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian-born US citizen who immigrated as a child and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Mr Trump also repeated claims that officials from former president Barack Obama’s administration spied on his campaign and underscored the need to keep Republicans unified against impeachment.
Now a Trump ally, Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina, has asked the State Department for documents on the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company.
The Judiciary Committee chairman and other senators met White House counsel Pat Cipollone as Republicans considered Mr Trump’s rebuttal to whatever impeachment articles may arrive from the House.
Another Republican senator, Ted Cruz, said if the White House wanted to call Hunter Biden as a witness, or the anonymous government whistleblower who alerted Congress to concerns about the phone call, then they “should be allowed to call them”.
Despite Mr Trump’s denials, Democrat Schiff says the testimony in the hearings has largely confirmed the accusations against the President.
“What have we learned through these depositions and through the testimony?” Schiff said as he closed the final session. “So much of this is undisputed.”
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week no decisions had been made on further hearings.
“As I said to the President, if you have any information that is exculpatory, please bring it forth, because it seems that the facts are uncontested as to what happened,” she said.
In the Senate, many of the next steps will depend on President Trump, whose shifting views have forced Repiblican senators to readjust their own.