Nancy Pelosi releases handy cheat-sheet about all of Trump’s impeachable offenses
Having trouble keeping track of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s bartering of American military assistance to Ukraine for dirt on the Biden family with all of the claims and counterclaims and a vigorous disinformation campaign being waged by the White House?
Don’t worry, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has you covered.
Speaker Pelosi’s office issued a four-page fact sheet detailing the evidence already compiled in the investigations by the House of Representatives’ various committees — a document that provides a roadmap to the Democrats’ case for the impeachment of the president.
Dividing the documentation of Trump’s illegal activities into three separate phases — “the shakedown,” “the pressure campaign” and “the cover-up” — the fact sheet makes a compelling case for the president’s immediate removal from office.
“President Trump has betrayed his oath of office, betrayed our national security and betrayed the integrity of our elections for his own personal political gain,” Speaker Pelosi’s convenient summary states before enumerating the timeline of the president’s unconstitutional behavior.
It begins with the draft transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky where he told the Ukraine leader that he would put his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General William Barr in touch with Zelensky’s government to “get to the bottom” of “a lot of talk” about the supposed corrupt dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
With the fate of American military assistance hanging in the balance for the former Soviet republic, the call amounts to evidence of “the shakedown.”
“The pressure campaign” is backed up by the text messages from former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker that illuminate the back and forth conversations between U.S. diplomats discussing the efforts to strongarm Ukraine into cooperating with their politically motivated attempts to find any information that could prove damaging to Trump’s political rival.
“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” one of those texts— from William Taylor, the chargé d’affaires for Ukraine — says, incriminatingly.
The final phase described in the House Speaker’s handy-dandy digest of impeachable offenses is “the cover-up” which began almost immediately after the fateful call between Trump and Zelensky when White House officials — in a panic over what they had heard transpire during the call — decided to hide all records of the call on separate server reserved for only the most highly-classified and sensitive top secrets, an effort that helped inspire the whistleblower who revealed the existence of the call to intelligence agency watchdogs to come forward with their complaint.
If one can find fault with Speaker Pelosi’s impeachment fact sheet, it is that it restricts itself to only the offenses related to the Ukraine scandal. As the Mueller report clearly demonstrated, the multiplicity of the president’s criminal actions means that the Democratic leader’s document is merely the highly abridged version of the many reasons Trump should be removed from office expeditiously.
With new developments and revelations emerging every day, the Democratic Speaker’s cheat sheet is a convenient way to stay on top of the facts without the chaff of the president’s diversionary tactics.
You can read the document for yourself at this link: 431368353-Trump-Shakedown-and-Coverup
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Original reporting by Cristina Marcos at The Hill.
