Impeachment inquiry hits crossroads
Report from House expected as Senate GOP readies for trial
WASHINGTON — They’ve 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.
“Frankly, I want a trial,” Trump declared Friday, and it looks like he’s going to get it.
Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff ’s staff and others are expected to spend the Thanksgiving week writing, and maybe even completing, a report of evidence gathered through more than six weeks of closed-door depositions and public hearings. By early December, the Judiciary Committee is expected to launch its own 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.
Several potentially key witnesses — former National Security Adviser John Bolton, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others — have so far declined to provide testimony or documents on Trump’s orders.
Democrats have said they don’t want to get tied up in lengthy court battles to force those witnesses to cooperate with subpoenas. But they could still hear testimony if one of them changed their mind, or if other key witnesses emerged.
“We’ve heard and seen compelling evidence that the president committed serious wrongdoing,” says Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, a member of the intelligence panel. “There are other witnesses, including some principal witnesses that we would have liked to have heard from, but the evidence has been pretty damning that the president committed an impeachable act.”
But Senate Republicans are already looking ahead to their turn.
The White House and congressional Republicans allied with Trump are preparing for a Senate trial in which they will not only declare Trump’s innocence but also present a version of events that portrays him as the victim of a broad plot to undermine his presidency even before it began.
Should they try to dispatch with such a trial in short order, which they may not have the votes to do, or should they stretch it out, disrupting the Democrats’ presidential primaries under the assumption that it helps more than hurts the GOP and 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,” Trump declared on Friday, calling in to “Fox & Friends” to talk for nearly an hour. The Democrats haven’t got anything to impeach him on, he claimed, and if the House proceeds their work will come crashing down in the Senate.
Congress’ impeachment inquiry, only the fourth in U.S. 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 firsthand testimony.
It all stems from Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s newly elected president. In it, Trump asked Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor,” which involved investigating Democrat Joe Biden and a theory — debunked by U.S. intelligence — that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in America’s 2016 election. In return, Democrats say, it was made clear to Zelenskiy by others that he would get a coveted Oval Office visit. And at the same time, Trump was holding up $400 million in military aid the East European ally relies on to counter Russian aggression at its border.
To Democrats, the evidence was damning and 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 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 Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., a Judiciary Committee member. “I don’t think we should be waiting.”
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week no decisions have 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.
To White House aides, the fact that the witnesses could not say he was withholding military aid until he got an announcement of an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden was proof that he had done nothing wrong.
To ensure support as the impeachment process plays out, Trump and his aides have spent weeks meeting or speaking individually with dozens of congressional Republicans, at times hosting them at Camp David and for lunch at the White House. At one White House visit recently, he hosted several lawmakers for a screening of the movie “Joker.”
The efforts were prompted in part at the urging of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and they have targeted even Trump critics like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who have listened to the president describe how he has been denied due process. Many Republicans increasingly come to agree with Trump about the validity of the inquiry, according to people familiar with the meetings.
Now Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, has asked the State Department for documents on the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company.
It’s still unclear how long a trial would last, what it would look like or what witnesses might be called.
Top White House officials met Thursday with Republican senators to discuss strategy but made no decisions, two people familiar with the session said.
Participants in the meeting expressed more interest in voting as soon as they have the 51 votes needed to acquit Trump than in setting a specific timetable for the proceedings, according to one Senate GOP aide.
That aide and a senior White House official said a trial lasting two weeks was discussed, but not agreed to. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting.
GOP Sen. Ted Cruz said if the White House wants to call Hunter Biden as a witness or the anonymous government whistleblower who alerted Congress to concerns about the phone call, “I think they should be allowed to call them,” he said on “The Ben Shapiro Show.”
The articles of impeachment are expected to mostly focus on Ukraine, though discussions continue. Democrats are considering an overall “abuse of power” article against Trump, which could be broken into categories like bribery or extortion. The article would center on the Democrats’ assertion, based on witness testimony, that Trump used his office to pressure Ukraine into politically motivated investigations.
Additional articles of impeachment could include obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.
Trump insists he did nothing wrong and in the “Fox & Friends” interview, unleashed a torrent of falsehoods to support his claims, including saying that the Obama administration wiretapped his 2016 campaign and asserting that Schiff “made up” a phone call of his, when, in fact, the California congressman stated at the time that he was conveying “the essence” of Trump’s July 25 call with Zelenskiy.
Schiff, Trump said, was “sick,” was part of a broader effort to damage his presidency and should be prosecuted.
“They thought I was going to win, and they said, ‘How could we stop him?’ ” he said. “They tried to overthrow the presidency. This is a disgrace.”
Despite 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 gaveled the final session closed late Thursday. “So much of this is undisputed.”
But if the outcome of the showdown on Capitol Hill at the moment appears foreordained, the ultimate verdict still is not. Unlike Presidents Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, Trump faces an election after his impeachment battle, meaning that the voters will serve as the court of appeals rendering their own final judgment on whether he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.
As a result, the debate that will now play out on Capitol Hill will be aimed not at swaying lawmakers firmly embedded in their partisan corners, but at framing the issue in ways that will resonate with the public.
“The impeachment jury is actually the smaller universe of voters in our country who are persuadable, swing voters who have avoided the tribalism plaguing most of our citizenry these days,” said former Rep. Chris Curbelo, R-Fla. “Their verdict will be issued next fall.”
While polls before the hearings showed that 49 percent favored impeachment versus 47 percent who opposed it, a survey by Yahoo News and YouGov at the end of the hearings found support for impeachment at 48 percent and opposition at 45 percent.
Other polls may eventually show movement but, at first blush, the drama of hearing the evidence presented out loud by real witnesses with evident credibility did not noticeably shift the overall dynamics.
Eventually, former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., said, the public tires of scandal and seeks to move on. Trump may win acquittal in the Senate, but that does not mean the public will be as forgiving.
“While they’re now trying to make the best of it with fundraising and saying this is going to help us, that fatigue” may set in, she said. “There are people who just want a normal presidency.”