2019 Congressional process regarding U.S. President Trump
The inquiry process which preceded the first impeachment of Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, was initiated by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on September 24, 2019, after a whistleblower alleged that Donald Trump may have abused the power of the presidency. Trump was accused of withholding military aid as a means of pressuring newly elected president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue investigations of Joe Biden and his son Hunter and to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election. More than a week after Trump had put a hold on the previously approved aid, he made these requests in a July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president, which the whistleblower said was intended to help Trump's reelection bid.
Believing critical military aid would be revoked, Zelenskyy made plans to announce investigations into the Bidens on the September 13 episode of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS". After Trump was told of the whistleblower complaint in late August and elements of the events had begun to leak, the aid was released on September 11 and the planned interview was cancelled. Trump declassified a non-verbatim summary of the call on September 24, the day the impeachment inquiry began. The whistleblower's complaint was given to Congress the following day and subsequently released to the public. The White House corroborated several of the allegations, including that a record of the call between Trump and Zelenskyy had been stored in a highly restricted system in the White House normally reserved for classified information.
In October, three congressional committees (Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs) deposed witnesses including Ukraine ambassador Bill Taylor, Laura Cooper (the top Pentagon official overseeing Ukraine-related U.S. policy), and former White House official Fiona Hill. Witnesses testified that they believed Trump wanted Zelenskyy to publicly announce investigations into the Bidens and Burisma (a Ukrainian natural gas company on whose board Hunter Biden had served) and 2016 election interference. On October 8, in a letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to House Speaker Pelosi, the White House officially responded that it would not cooperate with the investigation due to concerns including that there had not yet been a vote of the full House of Representatives and that interviews of witnesses were being conducted privately. On October 17, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney responded to a reporter's allegation of "quid pro quo saying": "We do that all the time with foreign policy. Get over it." He walked back his comments later, asserting that there had been "absolutely no "quid pro quo"" and that Trump had withheld military aid to Ukraine over concerns of the country's corruption.
On October 31, the House of Representatives voted 232–196 to establish procedures for public hearings, which started on November 13. As hearings began, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Trump may have committed bribery, which is listed in Article Two as an impeachable offense. Private and public congressional testimony by twelve government witnesses in November 2019 presented evidence that Trump demanded political favors in exchange for official action. On December 10, the House Judiciary Committee unveiled their articles of impeachment: one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress. Three days later, the Judiciary Committee voted along party lines (23–17) to approve both articles. On December 16, the House Judiciary Committee released a report specifying criminal bribery and wire fraud charges as part of the abuse of power charge. On December 18, the House voted mostly along party lines to impeach the president on both charges. The vote on Article One, abuse of power, was 230–197, with one vote of present. All Republicans voted against the article, joined by two Democrats. The vote on Article Two, obstruction of Congress, was 229–198, with one vote of present. All Republicans voted against the article, joined by three Democrats. Recent Republican, five-term Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan, also voted for impeachment; the frequent Trump critic had declared himself an Independent in July.
Background.
Previous calls for impeachment.
Efforts to impeach President Trump had been made by a variety of people and groups.
Early efforts.
The first efforts in the Republican-controlled Congress were initiated in 2017 by Representatives Al Green and Brad Sherman, both Democrats (D), in response to Trump's obstructions of justice in the Russian influence investigations begun during the first year of Trump's presidency. A December 2017 resolution of impeachment failed in the House by a 58–364 vote margin.
Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives following the 2018 elections and made Nancy Pelosi the new Speaker. While she opposed any move toward impeachment, she supported multiple committees' respective investigations into Trump's actions and finances. On January 17, 2019, new allegations involving Trump surfaced, claiming he instructed his long-time lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie under oath about Trump's conflict-of-interest involvement with the Russian government to erect a Trump Tower in Moscow. This also sparked requests for an investigation and for the president to "resign or be impeached" should such claims be substantiated.
Special Counsel Mueller's Report.
The report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, released on April 18, 2019, found that soon after the firing of James Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, Trump "engaged in conduct... involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public acts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation." The Mueller Report found "multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigation." For example, the Mueller Report found "substantial evidence" or "evidence" that:
Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that "The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests." Nevertheless, the Mueller Report made no definitive conclusion as to whether Trump had committed criminal obstruction of justice. Instead, the Special Counsel strongly hinted that it was up to Congress to make such a determination based on the evidence presented in the report. Congressional support for an impeachment inquiry increased as a result.
After the Special Counsel's Report.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially continued to resist calls for impeachment. In May 2019, she indicated that Trump's continued actions, which she characterized as obstruction of justice and refusal to honor congressional subpoenas, might make an impeachment inquiry necessary. An increasing number of Democrats and a then-Republican representative of the House, Justin Amash (who later became an independent), were requesting such an inquiry.
Fewer than 20 Representatives in the House supported impeachment by January 2019, but this number grew after the Mueller report was released and after Robert Mueller testified in July, up to around 140 Representatives before the Trump–Ukraine scandal surfaced.
Soon after the release of the Mueller report, Trump began urging an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, wanting to "investigate the investigators" and possibly discredit the conclusions of the FBI and Mueller. In April 2019, Attorney General William Barr announced that he had launched a review of the origins of the FBI's investigation, even though the origins of the probe were already being investigated by the Justice Department's inspector general and by U.S. attorney John W. Huber, who had been appointed to the same task in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Barr assigned U.S. Attorney John Durham to lead the probe, and Trump directed the U.S. Intelligence Community to "promptly provide assistance and information" to Barr, and delegated to him the "full and complete authority" to declassify any related documents. Although Durham was nominally in charge of the investigation, Barr himself began contacting foreign governments to ask for information about the origins of the FBI probe. Barr personally traveled to the United Kingdom and Italy to seek information; the Italian Parliament is expected to begin its own investigation into Barr's meetings with Italian intelligence agencies. At Barr's request, Trump himself phoned the prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, to ask for assistance.
Trump–Ukraine scandal.
Rudy Giuliani and his business associates.
In 2018, Florida businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman hired Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani as a consultant in their security company, paying him $500,000. In turn, Fruman and Parnas assisted him in his search in Ukraine for damaging information about Trump's political opponents. Giuliani sent Fruman and Parnas to Ukraine to seek information to undermine the Special Counsel's investigation and damage Biden's presidential campaign.
At the same time, Fruman and Parnas were being paid by Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, with alleged ties to Russian organized crime and the Kremlin, who is facing federal bribery charges in the U.S. and is fighting extradition from Austria.
From at least May 2019 to August 2019, Trump and Giuliani pressed the Ukrainian government to launch an investigation that would have negatively affected Trump's political rival Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Giuliani and his associates asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation into the business activities of Hunter Biden. The pressure tactics were developed by Giuliani and Gordon Sondland and applied in part by Parnas and Fruman. Zelenskyy reportedly felt rattled by the pressure, according to Amos Hochstein, a former diplomat and a member of Naftogaz's supervisory board, who alerted the National Security Council (NSC) of the matter in May 2019. Fruman and Parnas were arrested at Washington Dulles International Airport on October 9, 2019, on campaign finance-related charges brought by federal prosecutors in New York City.
The proposed investigation of Biden was based on a 2015 push by the U.S. to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he had been ignoring corruption in Ukraine and protecting political elites. At the time, this request had bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress and was also supported by the European Union. Joe Biden, who at the time was vice president, served as the face of this request. Ukraine fired Shokin in early 2016. Trump claimed that Biden's true motivation was to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings offshore, even though Shokin had placed his predecessor's investigation into Burisma on hold. Despite Trump's allegations, no one has produced evidence of any criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens.
In a January 2020 letter to Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, Schiff referred to a partially redacted text message in which Parnas told Giuliani "trying to get us mr Z," which Schiff asserted showed that Parnas "continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelensky." A subsequently unredacted version of the message showed that days later Parnas sent Giuliani a document that appeared to contain notes from an interview with Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma Holdings, casting doubt on Schiff's interpretation.
Withholding of military aid and July 25 phone call.
By July 18, 2019, Trump had—without explanation—put a hold on $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. In a July 25 phone call, Trump repeatedly asked Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch two investigations in cooperation with Giuliani and Attorney General Barr. One proposed investigation would concern a conspiracy theory—which originated on 4chan in 2017 and was spread by blogs, social media, and Fox News— that connected the American cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike to Ukrainian actors supposedly interfering in the 2016 election. Trump had been repeatedly told by his own aides that this allegation is false, but refused to accept those assurances. The other proposed investigation would concern Joe and Hunter Biden. At the time of the inquiry, Joe Biden was the leading presidential candidate in Democratic Party primary polling, making him Trump's most likely 2020 opponent.
This July 25 phone call was the subject of an anonymous complaint filed on August 12 in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. In late August, Trump was notified of the whistleblower's complaint. Congress and the public became aware of it on September 9. Two days later, Trump lifted the hold on military aid.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said on September 13 that he had issued a subpoena to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, as Maguire had failed to release the whistleblower's complaint to the congressional intelligence committees, as was arguably required by the relevant statute. Schiff argued that the complaint might have been withheld from Congress "in an unlawful effort to protect the President and conceal