House Intel Committee releases new report with roadmap to impeaching Trump
The House Intelligence Committee just released a new report about President Trump’s unlawful use of public office which likely will be the roadmap to a pair of articles of impeachment.
It is entitled “the Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report” and is based on over 100 hours of live testimony from 17 different witnesses. It outlines the Trump-directed scheme to coerce Ukraine into delivering baseless investigations for the personal benefit of his 2020 campaign. The abridged report without references weighs in at 9500-words with a 2500-word preface, or about a 35-40 minute read.
Overall, the report comes to two major conclusions.
First, President Trump solicited a foreign bribe in the form of favors for his election campaign before turning to direct an outright extortion campaign when he didn’t get what he wanted.
Second, that the president directed an overt and illegal cover-up by stonewalling the impeachment inquiry.
But its key findings of fact are a roadmap to the House Judiciary Committee which starts hearings tomorrow, and those only take up two and a half pages (embedded below). However, the Trump-Ukraine report’s succinct executive summary explains literally everything that the president did wrong in two major categories and only two-hundred and twenty words:
I. The President’s Misconduct: The President Conditioned a White House Meeting and Military Aid to Ukraine on a Public Announcement of Investigations Beneficial to his Reelection Campaign The President’s Request for a Political Favor
- The President Removed Anti-Corruption Champion Ambassador Yovanovitch
- The President’s Hand-picked Agents Begin the Scheme
- President Trump Froze Vital Military Assistance
- The President Conditioned a White House Meeting on Investigations
- The President’s Agents Pursued a “Drug Deal”
- President Trump Pressed President Zelensky to Do a Political Favor
- The President’s Representatives Ratcheted up Pressure on the Ukrainian President
- Ukrainians Inquired about the President’s Hold on Security Assistance
- The President’s Security Assistance Hold Became Public
- The President’s Scheme Unraveled
- The President’s Chief of Staff Confirmed Aid was Conditioned on Investigations
II. The President’s Obstruction of the House of Representatives’ Impeachment Inquiry: The President Obstructed the Impeachment Inquiry by Instructing Witnesses and Agencies to Ignore Subpoenas for Documents and Testimony An Unprecedented Effort to Obstruct an Impeachment Inquiry
- Constitutional Authority for Congressional Oversight and Impeachment
- The President’s Categorical Refusal to Comply
- The President’s Refusal to Produce Any and All Subpoenaed Documents
- The President’s Refusal to Allow Top Aides to Testify
- The President’s Unsuccessful Attempts to Block Other Key Witnesses
- The President’s Intimidation of Witnesses
House Intel’s voluminously complete Trump-Ukraine report clocks in at 300-pages-long, including detailed endnotes and 1400 fact references in its total of over one-hundred and thirty thousand words.
Buried deeply inside those references are a slew of details, like the information provided by Giuliani’s paymaster and indicted associate Lev Parnas, who has been eagerly pursuing avenues to cooperate with Congress.
Previously unknown phone logs cited in the report were produced by wireless carrier AT&T, and are buried inside its lengthy endnotes, which highlights the linkages between Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his other private attornies Joseph di Genova & Victoria Toensing, and the former New York mayor’s contacts with the White House and its Office of Management and Budget as far back as this past April.
Historians might spend years unpacking all of the details of what President Trump and those whom he refers to as “all the best people” have done.
Yet the House Intel Committee did an admirable job of boiling down an intricate international plot to secretly abuse the office of the presidency to induce public corruption in a foreign ally fighting a literal war at home into a terrifying two-minute summary of flagrant corruption that meets the constitutional standard for impeaching and removing a president.
There will be a vote of the House Intel Committee to formally adopt the findings of today’s report later this evening.
Read the Key Findings of today’s House Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report here:
The House Intel Trump-Ukraine #ImpeachmentInquiry report summarizes all of its key findings of fact in just three pages.https://t.co/iDXc4d1zVy
— Grant Stern (@grantstern) December 3, 2019
