President Donald Trump and First Lady Malania wave to the crowd from a skybox at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa at the Nov. 9 LSU-Alabama game: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

There is little doubt that Donald Trump abused his power as president by pressuring officials in Ukraine to help him in the 2020 election by investigating a potential political rival in exchange for releasing military aid in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and election law, according to a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, which found that Trump “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States.”

The report is a sweeping indictment of Trump’s behavior, and concludes that this president undermined American democracy, endangered national security and then in a massive coverup, worked to conceal his actions from Congress and intimidate witnesses.

“The founding fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country,” the report says: “Impeachment.”

The report now goes to the House Judiciary Committee, where formal articles of impeachment will be drafted and debated over the next few weeks.

While work will continue on the investigation in the Intelligence Committee, the report’s release sets in motion a historic constitutional clash that has happened only three times in the country’s history over whether to charge a president with high crimes and misdemeanors, the Constitution’s threshold for removing a president from office. While Republicans are set to defend this president along party lines, the House has the votes to send articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial, and it seems the time table will have it done before the Christmas break.

So it is likely that when Congress comes back into session in the new year in 2020, the stage will be set for a trial in the Senate like nothing most people alive have ever seen before.

Much of what’s in the 300-page report has already been known from previous hearings and news coverage, and describes an account from two months of sworn testimony by career diplomats and other administration officials about how the president and his allies pressured Ukraine to announce investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden while withholding about $400 million in military assistance and a White House meeting for Ukraine’s president, although there are new details about frequent phone calls between the White House and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani.

“The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, uncovered a months long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election,” the report says. In what is described as a “scheme,” it says Trump “subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential re-election campaign.”

The report includes damning details of how Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney either knew of the president’s efforts or were deeply involved in carrying them out.

See the Report here

In laying out a case for urgent action of checks and balances by the legislative branch on the executive, the report places Trump’s conduct in a broader context of wrongdoing that dated to the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump 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,” said Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California when releasing the report.

In addition to the direct charges, the report details a coverup, what it called an “unprecedented campaign of obstruction of this impeachment inquiry” by Trump, based on his refusal to release a single document from agencies including the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House budget office, and his directive that potential witnesses refuse to cooperate.

According to the New York Times coverage of the report, “even President Richard M. Nixon, whom the Judiciary Committee charged with contempt of Congress during the Watergate inquiry, produced voluminous records and allowed aides to testify voluntarily.”

“The damage to our system of checks and balances, and to the balance of power within our three branches of government, will be long-lasting and potentially irrevocable if the president’s ability to stonewall Congress goes unchecked,” the report concludes. “Any future president will feel empowered to resist an investigation into their own wrongdoing, malfeasance or corruption, and the result will be a nation at far greater risk of all three.”

The report shows that the committee collected more raw evidence than previously known, including telephone company records showing dozens of phone calls this spring between Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani, his associates and senior White House and administration officials, along with Representative Devin Nunes of California, the senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee, who is now under investigation himself for his role in this scheme.

In speaking to the news media upon the report’s release, Schiff indicated that call records showed “considerable coordination among the parties, including the White House” related to elements of the pressure campaign.

The calls came as Giuliani was executing a smear campaign against Marie L. Yovanovitch, then the ambassador to Ukraine, and pressing Kyiv to begin investigations that would benefit Trump. The records show calls between Giuliani; Lev Parnas, his business partner; Nunes; Nunes’s former aide Kash Patel, who works on the National Security Council; as well as unmarked numbers at the White House and the Office of Management and Budget that Democratic investigators suspect could be Trump and/or Mulvaney.

Written in narrative form, the report paints a portrait of a president eager to use the power of his office for personal gain, and a foreign policy establishment that watched with alarm as Trump’s allies exerted pressure on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to do Trump’s bidding.

The first part of the report, more than 100 pages, documents what is described as a scheme that was “as simple as it was inimical to our national security and election integrity: The president was withholding officials acts while soliciting something of value to his re-election campaign — an investigation into his political rival.”

That language appeared meant to serve as a basis for the Judiciary Committee to argue either that Trump had committed bribery or that he otherwise abused his power — both impeachable offenses, according to the Times.

Citing sworn testimony, the report accused Trump of forcing out Yovanovitch, and putting his personal lawyer and others in charge of Ukraine policy. It said the president froze vital military assistance to Ukraine and blocked a meeting with the country’s president, then used both as leverage to secure the investigations he wanted. And it recounted how Pence, who could become president should Trump be removed — unless he is included in the articles of impeachment for his involvement — was told by an ambassador that the military aid “had become tied to the issue of investigations” that Trump wanted announced.

“Vice President Pence nodded in response,” the report said, “apparently expressing neither surprise nor dismay at the linkage between the two.”

The report asserts that Trump agreed to release the security assistance only in the face of congressional scrutiny, convincing the White House “that attempts to condition the security assistance on the announcement of the political investigations beneficial to President Trump — and efforts to cover up that misconduct — would not last.”

The report’s authors spent more than 90 pages on the accusation that the president illegally tried to obstruct the congressional inquiry, arguing that Trump ignored the Constitution.

They cited Trump’s categorical refusal to cooperate with the investigation or comply with demands for documents. They said his refusal to allow top aides to appear violated the law. And they accused him of engaging in “a brazen effort to publicly attack and intimidate” witnesses who agreed to testify before the Intelligence Committee.

Anticipating the partisan divide in the next phase of the inquiry, Schiff used the report to lament the disconnect between the parties and warn that it amounted to precisely the kind of intensive polarization that worried the framers of the Constitution.

“Today, we may be witnessing a collision between the power of a remedy meant to curb presidential misconduct and the power of faction determined to defend against the use of that remedy on a president of the same party,” Schiff wrote. “But perhaps even more corrosive to our democratic system of governance, the president and his allies are making a comprehensive attack on the very idea of fact and truth.”

Republicans’ dismissal of the case and defense of Trump does not relieve Democrats of an obligation to press forward, he insisted, sending the report to the Judiciary Committee where hearings are scheduled to begin on Wednesday with a public hearing that features four constitutional scholars discussing the historical standards for impeachment and their assessment about whether Trump’s actions meet the bar for removing him from office.

Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill released their own report on Monday, condemning the Democratic impeachment effort and asserting that the president was not seeking personal political advantage when he pressed Ukraine’s leaders to investigate his rivals, but was instead urging the country to address corruption.

The Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York, will also consider potential evidence presented by other investigative committees and Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, who documented Trump’s attempts to thwart his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Trump has repeatedly denied all of the accusations against him, describing the call with Zelensky as “perfect” and insisting that he has done nothing wrong. Republicans in Congress have embraced the president’s defiant message as they assail the Democratic impeachment inquiry as unfair.

In the Senate, where it is increasingly apparent to leaders of both parties that the chamber is going to conduct an impeachment trial, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican from Kentucky, made it clear that he has been studying how to run such a trial.

He said he and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, could work out a bipartisan agreement governing procedures for a trial, or failing that, that “51 senators of any particular persuasion” could set the tone.

“There is no answer at the moment,” McConnell told reporters.

Two-thirds of senators would have to vote to convict Trump to end his presidency, an occurrence which most pundits at this point don’t expect to happen.

But even conservative Senators such as Richard Shelby of Alabama, the Republican from Tuscaloosa, could still consider the evidence and be convinced to do the right thing for the country, not just the party.

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby Keeps His Powder Dry on Impeachment