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Judiciary Committee Report Offers Legal Rationale for Impeaching Trump
The report, which echoes one released in 1974 as the House debated impeaching President Richard M. Nixon, comes two days before the committee will formally receive the evidence against President Trump.
By Michael D. Shear and
WASHINGTON — House Democrats released a report on Saturday intended to lay out the legal and historical underpinnings of their case for impeaching President Trump while also countering Republican accusations that the investigation of the president’s conduct in office has been unfair and illegitimate.
Democrats have accused the president of abusing his power by trying to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce investigations into his political rivals. They also claim that Mr. Trump obstructed the congressional inquiry by blocking witnesses from testifying and refusing to provide documents.
The 52-page report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee argues that the framers of the Constitution intentionally provided a way to remove the occupant of the Oval Office for just such misconduct.
“A president who perverts his role as chief diplomat to serve private rather than public ends has unquestionably engaged in ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’— especially if he invited, rather than opposed, foreign interference in our politics,” concludes the report, titled “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.”
On Monday, the committee will formally receive the evidence against Mr. Trump in a public hearing. Democratic and Republican lawyers for the House Intelligence Committee, which spent two months investigating the president’s actions, will testify and answer questions, the committee announced on Saturday.
Lawyers for the Judiciary Committee will also testify at the hearing as the panel’s 41 members begin a weeklong debate on whether to approve articles of impeachment. An official working on the inquiry, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss it publicly, said the presentations by the lawyers on each side, Barry H. Berke for the Democrats and Steve Castor for the Republicans, will serve as the “opening arguments.”
Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, issued a statement on Saturday calling on Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the committee, to postpone Monday’s hearing after Democrats on Friday night sent to lawmakers flash drives containing documents relating to the inquiry.
“It is impossible for judiciary members to sift through thousands and thousands of pages in any meaningful way in a matter of hours,” Mr. Collins said in a statement, noting that Republicans had been demanding access to the documents for weeks.
Mr. Collins was referring to information sent from the House Intelligence Committee, which produced an investigative report after spending two months examining the president’s actions related to Ukraine, and two other committees.
In a letter Friday night, the leaders of the committees wrote that flash drives sent to lawmakers contained “materials and records already released publicly, other records cited in the report, and certain sensitive materials.”
There was no immediate response from Mr. Nadler who has made no pretense about how he expects the debate to conclude.
“The Framers worst nightmare is what we are facing in this very moment,” he said on Twitter on Saturday as the Judiciary Committee report about the history of impeachment was released. “President Trump abused his power, betrayed our national security, and corrupted our elections, all for personal gain. The Constitution details only one remedy for this misconduct: impeachment.”
The report — which echoes a well-regarded 1974 document created by the same committee during the debate about whether to impeach President Richard M. Nixon — is an attempt to provide Democratic lawmakers with the constitutional rationale to support impeaching a president for only the third time in American history.
Both the 1974 report and the new one trace the origins of impeachment from monarchical England, where it was developed to hold the king’s ministers to account, to colonial America, where the framers of the Constitution believed it was a necessary remedy to ensure that the leaders of the new republic did not corrupt it for their personal benefit.
Both reports primarily focus on how to define “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” the offenses enumerated by the Constitution for impeachment.
But the current document is clearly meant to be a road map for Democrats, tracking closely with the allegations they have already made about Mr. Trump’s conduct. It lays out several offenses that could form the basis for articles of impeachment, including bribery, which is specifically cited in the Constitution.
“Impeachable bribery occurs when the president offers, solicits, or accepts something of personal value to influence his own official actions,” the report states. “By rendering such bribery impeachable, the framers sought to ensure that the nation could expel a leader who would sell out the interests of ‘We the People’ for his own personal gain.”
The report also makes the case for impeaching a president who abuses the power of his office through actions that are legal but not motivated by the national interests — a not-so-subtle nod to allegations that Mr. Trump’s decision to hold up Ukraine’s military aid was intended to help him personally
“At minimum, that duty requires presidents ‘to exercise their power only when it is motivated in the public interest rather than in their private self-interest,’” the report argues. “A president can thus be removed for exercising power with a corrupt purpose, even if his action would otherwise be permissible.”
Saturday’s report is also a legal rebuttal to the repeated attacks on the impeachment inquiry by Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. They have accused Democrats of orchestrating a “sham” impeachment that ignored historical traditions and did not provide the president with the right to defend himself.
The report’s authors say the inquiry followed rules similar to previous impeachments and note that if he is impeached, Mr. Trump will face a Senate trial, “where he may be afforded an opportunity to present an evidentiary defense and test the strength of the House’s case.”
The report also rejects the Republican argument that some evidence in the case should be ignored because it came from secondhand witnesses. “At this fact-finding stage, no technical ‘rules of evidence’ apply,” the report says. And it dismisses the argument by Mr. Trump and his aides that he did nothing wrong because Ukraine never delivered the investigations he wanted.
“The nation is not required to cross its fingers and hope White House staff will persist in ignoring or sidelining a president who orders them to execute ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’” the report says. “Nor can a President escape impeachment just because his corrupt plan to abuse power or manipulate elections was discovered and abandoned.”
Ross H. Garber, a lawyer who has defended several governors facing impeachment, criticized the report, saying it presented a “highhanded, extreme view” of the power of House Democrats to push forward with impeachment against Mr. Trump.
“While it is unquestionable that the Constitution accords the House ‘sole’ power to impeach, it does not follow that this power may be exercised effectively without recognizing its practical and political limits,” Mr. Garber said.
He added that the report “does not seem intended to educate or persuade, and is virtually guaranteed to do neither.Saturday’s Judiciary Committee report comes three days after the committee convened a panel of four constitutional scholars to discuss how to apply the history and legal grounding of impeachment to the evidence collected by the House.
Three of the scholars, all of whom were invited by Democrats, argued that Mr. Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine as presented by the inquiry clearly rose to the level of impeachable bribery or abuse of power and that his efforts to conceal it from Congress could also be construed as an impeachable offense.
A fourth scholar, called by Republicans, said the allegations could be impeachable but argued that Democrats had not sufficiently made that case in a rush to complete the process.
Speaking with reporters on Saturday, Mr. Trump denounced the inquiry as “a total hoax” and touched on a central player in the matter, Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, who was in Budapest and Kyiv this week for a documentary series intended to debunk the impeachment case.
“He’s going to make a report, I think to the attorney general and to Congress,” Mr. Trump said. “He says he has a lot of good information. I have not spoken to him about that information yet.”
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