Trump impeachment: Democrats finally unveil formal charges
Democrats have finally presented the article of impeachment against president Trump, accusing him of abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress.
Trump is said to have withheld aid to Ukraine for domestic political reasons. However Trump has urged the Senate to try him “sooner than later”.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said, “The president wants a trial.”
Trump insists he has done “nothing wrong” and has dismissed the impeachment process as “madness”.
If the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee votes to approve the articles later this week, they will then be submitted to the lower chamber for a full vote.
If, in turn, the articles are approved by the House – which is controlled by the Democrats – an impeachment trial in the Republican-held Senate will take place, possibly early in January.
The impeachment process was launched after an anonymous whistleblower complained to Congress in September about a July phone call by Trump to the president of Ukraine.
If the House of Representatives votes to impeach Donald J. Trump, he will join Andrew Johnson (1868) and Bill Clinton (1998) as the only other presidents to be sanctioned in this way since American independence.
He is alleged to have committed “high crimes and misdemeanours” (a phrase from the US Constitution) on two counts outlined by Mr Nadler:
The first allegation is that he exercised the powers of his public office to “obtain an improper personal benefit while ignoring or injuring the national interest”, by allegedly putting pressure on Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
The second allegation is that “when he was caught, when the House investigated and opened an impeachment inquiry, President Trump engaged in unprecedented categorical and indiscriminate defiance of the impeachment inquiry”, thereby obstructing Congress.
The charges are set out in detail in a Judiciary Committee document.
Trump “sees himself as above the law”, Mr Nadler said. “We must be clear, no-one, not even the president, is above the law.”
In the July phone call to Ukraine’s leader, Mr Trump appeared to tie US military assistance for Ukraine to its launching of investigations that could help him politically.
In return for those investigations, Democrats say Mr Trump offered two bargaining chips – $400m (£304m) of military aid that had already been allocated by Congress, and a White House meeting for President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Democrats say this pressure on a vulnerable US ally constitutes an abuse of power.
The first investigation Trump, allegedly, wanted from Ukraine was into former Vice-President Joe Biden, his main Democratic challenger, and his son Hunter. Hunter Biden joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company when his father was President Barack Obama’s deputy.
The second Trump demand, also allegedly, was that Ukraine should try to corroborate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the last US presidential election. This theory has been widely debunked, and US intelligence agencies are unanimous in saying Moscow was behind the hacking of Democratic Party emails in 2016.
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