WASHINGTON • The House Judiciary Committee will pursue two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, focused on his effort to push Ukraine to announce investigations that would benefit him in 2020 and his decision to block participation in the subsequent congressional probe.

“We must be clear: No one, not even the president, is above the law,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said Tuesday.

The first article of impeachment accuses Trump of soliciting foreign election interference by pressing Ukraine to undertake politically helpful investigations and conditioning U.S. aid to Kyiv and a White House meeting on those probes. Democrats also allege Trump obstructed Congress by preventing at least nine officials from testifying and by blocking records from across the federal government from being shared with Congress.

The president has dismissed the impeachment effort as a hoax, and Republicans have defended Trump’s conduct and said Democrats of relying on secondhand information to pursue their case.

“There’s nothing that has actually come close to an impeachable offense,” said Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “Abuse of power is so amorphous,” he said, adding that “they’ve been telling the American people he’s committed a crime for three months and this is what we get?”

Only two presidents have been impeached; no president has been convicted in the Senate. Democrats say they must act now, before next year’s elections, because they say the president is liable to continue to solicit more foreign help for that election, pointing to his 2016 call for Russia to unearth negative information on rival Hillary Clinton.

The House Judiciary Committee — made up of 24 Democrats and 17 Republicans — aims to begin holding votes on the two impeachment articles this week, with the aim of starting that process no later than Thursday, one Democrat said. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said he expects the House to consider impeachment on the floor next week.

If the House votes for impeachment articles, as expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would then send the articles to the Senate, which is expected to hold a trial early next year. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said at his weekly news conference Tuesday “it’s not possible” to turn to a Senate trial before Congress’ holiday break.

Senators of both parties say it is very unlikely that the trial results in a conviction or the president’s removal from office. Republicans hold a slim majority in the Senate, and conviction requires a two-thirds majority vote.

On Monday, the Republicans’ top counsel on the House Intelligence Committee said Democrats were making too much of a transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president, which he said was ambiguous. In the call, Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favor” and also to “look into” Joe Biden, a potential Trump opponent next year, and a theory that Ukraine and not Russia interfered in the 2016 elections. He also said he would direct his personal lawyer and Attorney General William Barr to contact Zelensky to help him in a possible investigation.

Biden’s son sat on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Group while his father was overseeing U.S. policy toward Ukraine, an arrangement that Trump has said was corrupt. The Bidens deny any wrongdoing.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney declined to weigh in on allegations. The investigation is “a political process, not a legal process,” he said Tuesday.

In focusing on only two articles of impeachment, Democrats opted for a narrow approach, hoping to keep their caucus from splitting and to present a case that would be easy for the public to understand. That meant deciding against an obstruction of justice charge related to the probe conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller on Russian election interference, a possible charge that they debated for weeks.

Many Democrats had lobbied for an obstruction of justice charge, saying that Congress needed to address Mueller’s report, which detailed at least five instances of possible presidential obstruction. Mueller declined to exonerate the president. Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that Trump’s actions didn’t constitute a crime.

“We wanted to develop articles of impeachment that enjoy the broad support of the caucus and that focused on the most serious conduct,” said Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., a Judiciary member. “Abuse of power is the highest of high crimes and misdemeanors, and so that incorporates a lot of conduct.”

The White House would like a trial to begin right away, a person familiar with White House thinking said, and Trump is “interested in this resolving as quickly as possible,” the person said.

Before the articles were introduced, Democratic lawmakers from districts Trump won in 2016 briefly talked about trying to get some Republicans together who would vote on censuring rather than impeaching Trump, but they didn’t move forward.

From left, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Financial Services chairwoman Maxine Waters, Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler, Oversight and Reform chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal and Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff announce articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday.

the associated press