House Democrats on Tuesday asserted that President Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to help him in the 2020 presidential election, releasing an impeachment report that found the President “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States”.
The report by the House Intelligence Committee was a sweeping indictment of the President’s behaviour, concluding that he sought to undermine American democracy and endangered national security, then worked to conceal his actions from Congress.
Democrats left it to another committee to decide whether to recommend Trump’s impeachment, but their report presented what are all but certain to be the grounds on which the House votes to formally charge him.
“The founding fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment,” it said.
The intelligence panel adopted it, strictly along partisan lines, hours after its release.
Though the committee indicated it would continue investigative work, the report’s release set in motion the next phase in the impeachment of Trump, accelerating a constitutional clash that has happened only three times in the nation’s history.
Both parties are poised for a raucous debate in the House Judiciary Committee over whether to charge the President with high crimes and misdemeanors, the Constitution’s threshold for removal, and a likely partisan vote by the House to do so before Christmas.
The 300-page report provided some new details of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s frequent calls to the White House. But for the most part, it described the account that emerged over more than two months of sworn testimony from diplomats and other administration officials of how the President and his allies pressured Ukraine to announce investigations of former Vice-President Joseph R. Biden Jr and other Democrats, while withholding nearly $400 million in military assistance and a White House meeting for Ukraine’s President.
“The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, uncovered a monthslong effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election,” the report said.
It asserted that Trump’s “scheme subverted US foreign policy towards Ukraine and undermined our national security in favour of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential re-election campaign”.
And it detailed how officials at the highest levels of his administration — including Vice-President Mike Pence; secretary of state Mike Pompeo; Rick Perry, the energy secretary; and Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff — either knew of the President’s efforts or were deeply involved in carrying them out.
Making a case for urgent congressional action, Democrats tried to place Trump’s conduct in a broader context of wrongdoing that they said dated to the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump, they argued, first accepted help from one foreign power, Russia, to win the presidency, and then turned around and tried to enlist another, Ukraine, to bolster his 2020 re-election campaign.
“We do not intend to delay when the integrity of the next election is still at risk,” Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said after the report’s release.
Travelling with Trump in London for a meeting of Nato leaders, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, denounced the Democratic report moments after it was released. She called it the conclusion of a “one-sided sham process”.
“Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” Grisham said in a statement.
“Chairman Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”
Earlier in the day, Trump savaged Schiff as “deranged” and “sick”, accusing Democrats of trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election through an impeachment inquiry he said “turned out to be a hoax”.