And new records of Rudy Giuliani's phone calls.
Welcome back to the Impeachment Briefing. Today we saw the Democrats’ impeachment report, including new phone records that point to Rudy Giuliani’s involvement. |
- Democrats on the three House committees running the impeachment investigation released a 300-page report detailing a case that President Trump abused his power by withholding a White House meeting and military aid as he pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
- The report, which also accuses Mr. Trump of obstructing the impeachment inquiry, incorporates more than two months of testimony from diplomats and administration officials, in addition to call records and other evidence discovered by the committees conducting the inquiry. The witnesses provided “overwhelming evidence of his misconduct,” the report says of Mr. Trump.
- A senior Ukrainian official told The Times that she and others knew about the hold on military aid in July, acknowledging for the first time that officials in Kyiv were aware of the freeze during the Trump administration’s pressure campaign. She said advisers to Ukraine’s president sought to keep that fact from surfacing to avoid getting drawn into the American impeachment debate.
|
Four key takeaways from the Democratic report |
The report represents the end of the first phase of the impeachment inquiry and the transfer of the case to the House Judiciary Committee. Here are a few revealing items from the document. |
1. Phone records provide new evidence of Rudy Giuliani’s involvement. |
While the report offers few new revelations, it includes extensive call records produced by AT&T and Verizon showing how frequently Mr. Giuliani was in touch with people involved in a smear campaign against Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, including more than a dozen calls with the White House in the two days before her removal in late April. |
Among those implicated: John Solomon, a columnist for The Hill; Lev Parnas, an indicted business associate of Mr. Giuliani; the Office of Management and Budget, the agency responsible for overseeing the military aid; Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee; and a mysterious “-1,” a possible reference to Mr. Trump himself. |
2. Investigators home in on the White House’s involvement in the pressure campaign, making over 100 references to the White House chief of staff. |
“Our investigation determined that 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 says, referring to Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. “Rather, it was a dramatic crescendo within a monthslong campaign driven by President Trump.” |
The authors repeatedly cite the news conference by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, in which he openly told reporters that Mr. Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on the political investigations. It was that moment, among other incidents, when Mr. Trump “became the author of his own impeachment inquiry,” Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote in the report’s preface. |
3. Over 90 pages of the report are committed to Mr. Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry. |
The report says that Mr. Trump “ordered and implemented a campaign to conceal his conduct from the public,” which led to 12 current or former officials’ refusal to appear, 10 of whom were subpoenaed. “Donald Trump is the first and only president in American history to openly and indiscriminately defy all aspects of the Constitutional impeachment process,” the report reads. |
4. The report makes over 100 references to the Constitution |
“The Founding Fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment,” investigators wrote in a summary of the report. In the preface, Mr. Schiff wrote that “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." |
Mr. Schiff also appealed to historical precedent, warning that Mr. Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry means that “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.” |
Mr. Giuliani’s calls were the biggest revelation of the report, but the footnotes also contained records of calls between Mr. Nunes and Mr. Parnas. |
Mr. Parnas has indicated that he would be willing to testify before impeachment investigators, and this afternoon his lawyer, Joseph Bondy, tweeted a message to Mr. Nunes: |
Minutes after that tweet was sent, The Washington Examiner reported that Mr. Nunes had filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN. The article at the center of the suit, citing Mr. Bondy as its source, said Mr. Nunes had met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. |
Mr. Nunes denied the claim, and in the suit called Mr. Parnas “a renowned liar, a fraudster, a hustler, an opportunist with delusions of grandeur.” |
What to expect from tomorrow’s hearing |
At 10 a.m. tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee will hold its first impeachment hearing, calling witnesses to discuss the constitutional grounds for impeachment. Here’s what to know. |
The committee: With 41 members, the House Judiciary Committee is much bigger than the House Intelligence Committee, which held the first round of public impeachment hearings. Some of Mr. Trump’s most committed cable news allies sit on it: Representatives Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, John Ratcliffe and Doug Collins, the panel’s top-ranking Republican. |
Some of the most visible Democrats in the House are also on the committee: Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Eric Swalwell, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ted Lieu and Pramila Jayapal. The committee’s chairman, Representative Jerry Nadler, has been the face of much of the House’s Trump-related investigative activity over the past year. |
The witnesses: The hearing will feature four scholars: Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor; Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor; Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law; and Jonathan Turley, a professor at The George Washington University Law School. |
Several of the witnesses have been outspoken about impeachment. Mr. Feldman wrote last month that Mr. Trump created “a crisis in the presidency by abusing the power of his office.” Mr. Gerhardt last week said Mr. Trump “has dismissed the rule of law as being relevant to his life.” Mr. Turley could be more favorable to Republicans: His recent commentary indicates that he is likely to say that Democrats do not yet have a case to impeach the president. |
The format: My colleague Nick Fandos tells me that tomorrow’s hearing will look much like the previous impeachment hearings: It will have 45-minute chunks of questioning from committee staff, then shorter rounds of questioning from members of the committee. |
| I’m eager to know what you think of the newsletter, and what else you’d like to see here. Email your thoughts to briefing@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward you the briefing? Sign up here. |
| You can unsubscribe through the link at the bottom of this email, and it won’t affect your regular Morning Briefing subscription. |
