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Democrats unveil further steps for Trump impeachment probe
It is highly unlikely that the president will be convicted.
Democrats unveiled the next phase of their impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, which sets the rules for holding public hearings and allows the US president to participate in them through his lawyers and for Republicans to call their own witnesses.
The text of the resolution, which is expected to be passed in a vote along party lines in the Democratic-controlled House on Thursday, was released as White House National Security Council officiaL who had listened in on Trump’s controversial phone call with the Ukrainian president told impeachment investigators that the transcript of the conversation was released with several omissions despite his attempt to fix them. Lt Col Alexander Vindman’s testimony came at an acrimonious closed-door hearing of the House intelligence committee in which a shouting match broke out as Democrats accused Republicans of trying to expose a whistle-blower (not Vindman) whose original complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry.
Testimonies from more officials are slated to bolster the narrative that Trump held up aid cleared by Congress to force Ukraine to probe his political rival, former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, on the latter’s business dealings with an Ukrainian firm. Officials are expected to testify on the turmoil in the White House about these efforts spearheaded by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and how an alarmed former national security adviser John Bolton called them a “drug deal” and that a former US ambassador to Ukraine was removed for failure to go along with these efforts.
The White House has called the impeachment inquiry an “illegitimate sham” and has refused to cooperate with it, arguing it lacks proper authorisation as it had not been voted by the House, as had been done in previous two instances (for President Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton).
Though the text of the resolution posted Tuesday did not explicitly say it was authorising the impeachment inquiry — and there is some dispute among experts if is an authorisation or not, as an authorisation is not constitutionally required— it does formalise the process by which Democrats plan to move the inquiry towards the adoption of the “articles of impeachment”, the formal charges.
The resolution direct five committees to continue their investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry into “whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America”.
