Congressional Democrats Open Impeachment Inquiry
The U.S. House of Representatives, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced last month the opening of a formal impeachment inquiry. Pelosi had long resisted any impeachment talk, even in the face of constant pressure from other House and Senate Democrats. Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump's public statements, and a possible attempt to have a foreign power interfere in the U.S. presidential election have all been the center of the House's investigation.
According to Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, the President “shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Bribery involves offering an official act in exchange for something of value. Impeachment of a president has been exceedingly rare in American history. The House has impeached only two U.S Presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Senate trials acquitted both soon after. Richard Nixon infamously resigned in the face of impending impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. In its history, Congress has never successfully impeached and removed a U.S. President from office.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees received a whistleblower report last month expressing “urgent concern” regarding Trump “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election…to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” According to the complaint, “The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort.”
Trump has admitted to pressuring Zelensky to investigate his political opponent, stating, “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in Ukraine.” Neither Trump nor Ukraine have produced any evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens. Trump’s personal attorney Giuliani has also admitted to pressuring Ukraine to investigate Trump’s likely 2020 presidential opponent in a Sept. 19 interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, stating, “Of course I did.”
According to a readout of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky that the White House released, Trump responded to Zelensky’s request for more U.S. Javelin missile systems by saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” The edited transcript matches up with specific concerns stated in the whistleblower’s complaint. Trump has repeatedly defended the phone call by calling it a “perfect conversation”.
House Democrats seem to be focused on presidential abuse of power, according to NBC's Heidi Przybyla. Additional legal landmines complicate the situation further, particularly for those surrounding the president who aren’t protected by the Department of Justice's policy not to indict a sitting president. The Foreign Agents Registration Act “requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities,” according to the United States Department of Justice website. Furthermore, Section 30121 of the Federal Election Laws states that it’s illegal for a U.S. “person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation…from a foreign national,” either directly or indirectly. This includes “money or other thing of value”. In addition, the Antideficiency Act “prohibits federal agencies from obligations or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services,” according to the U.S Government Accountability Office’s website. All of these laws violate U.S. criminal statues and are punishable by fines and prison time.
The Emoluments Clause presents an additional area of liability for President Trump. According to Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8 of the U.S. Constitution, “No person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Trump referred to the statue as “this phony emoluments clause” last Oct. 21, while asserting that he had put his business interests into blind trusts when he became president. Many constitutional scholars have argued that Trump has continued to profit off his position as President by not separating himself from his family businesses.
Giuliani has come under increasing fire from both Democrats and Republicans in regards to his shadow foreign policy operation. Authorities arrested two Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, at Washington’s Dulles Airport earlier this month. Both men had one-way tickets out of the country. Parnas and Fruman were indicted for money laundering and U.S. election interference. Authorities also arrested two other Giuliani associates, Andrey Kukushkin and David Correia, on related charges. Giuliani has admitted Parnas’s firm paid him $500,000 for legal advice. Trump has denied knowing any of these individuals, despite multiple photographs showing them together.
The Wall Street Journal recently obtained access to Parnas’ Instagram account, which showed frequent contacts between Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani, including at Giuliani’s birthday celebration at Yankee’s Stadium, as well as at President George H.W. Bush’s funeral last December. Other photographs show Parnas, his son, and Fruman at the White House with Trump. Another photo shows Parnas having dinner with Trump’s legal team the day after Attorney General William Barr released his version of the Mueller report findings, which many experts have said largely misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions. The photo caption on Parnas’ Instagram account that day reads, “Congratulations team trump !!! Job well done !!! Even during our celebration dinner every body hard at work !!! #trump2020.”
Parnas’s lawyer John Dowd, who has also represented President Trump while in office, released a letter earlier this month saying, “Be advised that Messrs. Parnas and Fruman assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump.” Multiple photographs also show Parnas and Fruman with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who officially run the Trump Organization and other family businesses while their father is president.
Congressional House investigations have thus far been focused on the testimony of career diplomats involved in the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy. Trump allies and many of his political appointees have thus far defied Congressional House subpoenas, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, setting the stage for legal battles in the courts. In contrast, many State Departments officials have willingly complied with lawful House impeachment subpoenas, defying White House instructions to resist.
Ex-US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified that she was fired as a result of pressure Trump put on the State Department to remove her. She said Giuliani and former Ukrainian officials saw her as a threat to their “financial and political interests,” according to the Washington Post.
State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent testified he was told to “lie low” after raising concerns regarding Giuliani’s efforts to get Ukraine to meddle in U.S election, according to Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-VA, a senior member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Kent also stated that Giuliani pushed for an American visa for a former Ukrainian official who had promised political dirt on Democrats, in spite of previously being denied one by the federal government.
Former State Department senior adviser Michael McKinley testified that he repeatedly asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to support Yovanovitch, to no avail. He resigned after unsuccessfully raising concerns about the politicalization of the State Department. European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland, a Republican donor whom Trump nominated after receiving a million dollar donation, testified that Trump directed Giuliani to push the debunked Ukraine election meddling scheme. He also said Trump directed other U.S. diplomats to work with Giuliani in this goal, according to his official statement to the House.
Every American government and intelligence agency that has publicly spoken on election interference into the 2016 U.S. presidential election has said Russia interfered. To quote the Mueller report, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion…that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly admitted he favored Trump in the 2016 election when he was asked during a press conference with Trump in Helsinki, Finland last year, stating, “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.” Giuliani, on the other hand, seemed intent on breathing life into the debunked conspiracy theory that the Democrats and Ukrainians colluded to help Clinton and hurt Trump. No evidence has been shown to support such a claim. Trump’s handpicked ex-homeland security adviser Tom Bossert has also shot down the conspiracy theory, saying on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” that “The DNC [Democratic National Committee] server and that conspiracy theory has got to go…It is completely debunked.”
Trump’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill testified that she saw “wrongdoing” in American foreign policy regarding Ukraine, and tried to report it. Hill said former National Security Adviser John Bolton referred to Giuliani as a “hand grenade” who was “going to blow everybody up,” according to The New York Times. Bolton characterized the rogue operation by Sondland and Mulvaney as a “drug deal” of which he wanted no part in, and instructed Hill to alert White House lawyers.
Perhaps most significantly, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney recently admitted in a rare White House press briefing to a quid pro quo involving holding up American military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt on Joe Biden. In response to ABC’s White House reporter Jonathan Karl asking, “To be clear, what you’ve described is a quid pro quo. Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democratic server happened as well?”
Mulvaney responded by saying, “We do that all the time with foreign policy…I’ve got news for everybody: get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” After repeating the claim again during the presser, Mulvaney tried to take it back in a prepared White House statement later in the day. White House lawyers quickly distanced themselves from Mulvaney’s comments.
Cracks have begun to form in Trump’s Republican firewall, with multiple GOP members of Congress expressing concern regarding Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, chiefly among them Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida, who announced his retirement last week. As Romney said earlier this month, “Holding up funds to a foreign nation, particularly one that is under military threat [from Russia] in order to fulfill a political purpose is a real problem.”
A recent Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans — 52 percent — support President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. President Clinton never got past 40 percent during his House and Senate impeachment hearings, while President Nixon only surpassed 50 percent two weeks before he was forced to resign.