WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump about two and a half months after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., first announced a formal impeachment inquiry into the president.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., announced that his committee will consider two articles of impeachment — one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress — charging Trump “with committing high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Nadler said the articles of impeachment were being filed in response to Trump allegedly soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election, compromising national security, threatening the integrity of the upcoming election and concealing evidence from Congress and the American people. Trump, he said, violated his oath of office.
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Trump, Nadler said, exercised “the powers of his public office to obtain an improper personal benefit” and engaged in “indiscriminate defiance of the impeachment inquiry.”
Pelosi and Nadler were flanked by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Ways & Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.
“The argument, ‘why don’t you just wait?’ amounts to this: ‘Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election. Why not let him cheat just one more time. Why not let him have foreign help, just one more time,'” Schiff said.
“The president’s oath of office appears to mean very little to him,” Schiff added, citing Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s October call to “get over it” when asked about whether there was any link between the president’s push for Ukrainian investigations and the withholding of nearly $400 in military aid to the country. Mulvaney later walked his comments back.
Pointing to Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani’s recent trip to Ukraine, Schiff said Trump “still wants Ukraine to interfere” in the 2020 election and boost his campaign.
The Trump campaign and allies swiftly pushed back too. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement that Democrats “are putting on this political theater because they don’t have a viable candidate for 2020 and they know it.” Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said Pelosi “can invent whatever false charges she wants, but the American people see this for what it is: yet another partisan attempt to overthrow a duly-elected president and rob voters of the chance to re-elect him in 2020.”
The announcement comes a day after the Judiciary Committee held its second public impeachment hearing, in which lawyers for the Democrats and the Republicans took turns summarizing the cases they’ve built. NBC News reported Monday night that Democrats had settled on bringing two articles of impeachment against the president.
With Congress slated to leave Washington by the end of next week, Democrats are expected to move swiftly to hold a vote in the Judiciary Committee to adopt and recommend the articles to the House for a floor vote before the holiday break.
Democrats had been wrestling with whether to make the articles narrow, focusing only on the president’s alleged misconduct in Ukraine, or expanding them to include issues such as obstruction of justice, raised in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report, or alleged violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
Once the articles come to the floor, they are expected to be adopted by the Democratic-controlled House. Once that happens, the process moves to the Republican-held Senate, which is then expected to hold a trial on whether to remove Trump from office. So far, Senate Republicans have shown no sign they will break with the president on impeachment.
