Impeachment report says Trump abused power
WASHINGTON • A Democratic-led House committee approved a report accusing President Donald Trump of soliciting foreign election interference and placing “his own personal and political interests above the national interests” by pushing Ukraine to announce an investigation into a 2020 political rival.
Trump and other officials pressured Kyiv to announce probes into Democrat Joe Biden and into a theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 elections, which was contradicted by a bipartisan Senate inquiry. The House report alleged that Trump made the Ukraine president’s request for a White House visit and military aid contingent on Ukraine’s announcement of those probes.
Trump has denied wrongdoing or improper exchange of favors related to the investigations he sought. The Republican president has said the phone call in which he asked Ukraine’s president for the probes was “perfect.”
The report, circulated hours before the Intelligence Committee approved the report with a 13-9 vote along party lines, also alleged that Trump “engaged in categorical and unprecedented obstruction in order to cover up his misconduct.”
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham called the impeachment inquiry a “one-sided sham process” in which Democrats and Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had “utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump.”
“Chairman Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing,” Grisham said.
The report’s release follows months of investigation by the Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, including testimony from 17 witnesses from across the federal government. It traces how, according to the panels’ Democrats, Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president was part of a broader pressure campaign against a country dependent on the U.S. in its resistance to Russian aggression. The report alleges that top U.S. officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, were complicit in that effort.
“This telephone call was neither the start nor the end of President Trump’s efforts to bend U.S. foreign policy for his personal gain,” the report said. “It was a dramatic crescendo within a monthslong campaign driven by President Trump” in which Pence and Pompeo as well as Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Energy Secretary Rick Perry “were either knowledgeable of or active participants in an effort to extract from a foreign nation the personal political benefits sought by the President.”
A spokesman for Pence denied wrongdoing. Spokespeople for Pompeo and Mulvaney didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Perry couldn’t be reached.
Following approval by the House Intelligence Committee later Tuesday, the report heads to the House Judiciary Committee, which holds its first hearing on the matter Wednesday as it weighs drafting articles of impeachment. It is up to Judiciary to explain whether and how the conduct constitutes grounds for impeachment. The full House could vote on articles of impeachment before Christmas, which, if approved, would lead to a Senate trial.
In releasing their 300-page report, Democrats also shared records of calls between figures including Rep. Devin Nunes, R.-Calif., the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee that has led the impeachment probe; Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer; and Lev Parnas, an associate who helped Giuliani’s efforts to investigate Biden and his son, and who has been indicted on campaign-finance charges.
The phone records suggest Giuliani’s involvement in several key episodes that have become a focus of the impeachment probe. The frequent contacts between Nunes, Giuliani and Parnas are unusual and likely to renew Democrats’ calls for Nunes to face an ethics investigation.
A lawyer for Parnas said his client’s conversations with Nunes in April were focused on corruption probes in Ukraine. By that point, Parnas had for months been helping Giuliani push Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and alleged interference by Ukraine in the 2016 U.S. election — the effort that set off the impeachment inquiry.
In their calls, Parnas and Nunes discussed investigations into corruption in Ukraine, according to Ed MacMahon, a lawyer for Parnas. By that point, Parnas had been assisting Giuliani for months on his push for investigations into the Bidens and alleged election interference in Ukraine.
“They weren’t talking about where to find sushi in Kyiv,” MacMahon said. He added, “Lev is in a position to fill in all these blanks and explain what actually happened with all these phone calls. But he remains under indictment in the Southern District of New York, and he needs protections to tell his story. He needs immunity.”
Parnas in 2018 helped set up meetings in Europe for investigators working for Nunes, who were looking into corruption in Ukraine, MacMahon said, without specifying what the investigators were examining. Before the impeachment inquiry began, Nunes had tweeted allegations that Ukraine sought to aid Democrats in the 2016 election.
Nunes declined to comment on the substance of his calls with Parnas or on how the impeachment investigators obtained his call records.
Impeachment investigators also obtained copies of retainer agreements between Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, two lawyers close to Giuliani and Trump, and current and former Ukrainian prosecutors.
Toensing signed contracts on April 12 agreeing to represent Yuriy Lutsenko, then the Ukrainian prosecutor general, and Kostiantyn Kulyk, a Ukrainian prosecutor, in meetings with U.S. officials about alleged “evidence” of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, the report said.
The report from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump is photographed in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2019. The House released a sweeping impeachment report outlining evidence of what it calls Trump’s wrongdoing toward Ukraine. The findings will serve as the foundation for debate over whether the 45th president should be removed from office.
ABOVE: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., highlights some key statements from figures in the impeachment inquiry during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday. LEFT: Ranking minority House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., heads to a secure area of the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday. Democrats on the committee shared records of calls between Nunes, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Lev Parnas, an associate who helped Giuliani’s efforts to investigate Biden and his son.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., heads to a secure area of the Capitol in Washington Tuesday. Democrats shared records of calls between Nunes, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Lev Parnas, an associate who helped Giuliani’s efforts to investigate Biden and his son.