Next steps in impeachment inquiry
After two weeks of testimony, the White House and Congress plunge into planning for next phase.
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 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 compiling the panel’s findings. 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.
Offering his own take on five days of public hearings, Trump brushed off the impeachment inquiry as “total nonsense” Friday and badmouthed a number of the U.S. diplomats who testified about his Ukraine pressure campaign.
In one breath, Trump said House Democrats looked like “fools” during the hearings on Capitol Hill. In another, he offered a window into his political strategy ahead of an expected House vote to impeach him. If that happens, the Senate would hold a trial on whether to oust him from office.
“I think we had a tremendous week with the hoax,” Trump said at the White
House.
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.
House Democrats may yet call additional witnesses first, notably John Bolton, 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.
Should they try to dispatch with 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 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 Friday, calling in to “Fox & Friends” to talk about his achievements 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.
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.
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 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.”
Trump insists he did nothing wrong and Friday revived the Ukraine interference idea, which he relies on to push investigations of Biden’s son Hunter, who served on the board of a gas company in Ukraine.
“They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian,” Trump said. “I still want to see that server. The FBI has never gotten that server.”
Trump’s former security aide Fiona Hill warned Republicans in Thursday’s hearing that it’s a “false narrative ,” one that’s dangerous for the U.S. and plays into Russia’s hands.
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 Russianborn U.S. citizen who immigrated as a child and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
But now Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has asked the State Department for documents on the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company.
The Judiciary Committee chairman and other senators met with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone as Republicans consider Trump’s rebuttal to whatever impeachment articles may arrive from the House.
In the Senate, much of the next steps will depend on Trump, whose shifting views have forced GOP senators to readjust their own. They left the White House meeting without consensus but plan to meet again, according to a person familiar with the session.