Laurence H. Tribe

Opinion contributor

Let us count the ways. The White House readout of President Donald Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that the American president has committed a multitude of high crimes and misdemeanors, all of them impeachable. Even without considering the many prior offenses that were surfaced in the Mueller report and in the special counsel’s prosecutions of numerous Trump allies and associates, including in the Southern District of New York, this readout — which must be the least incriminating version the White House could compose despite its remarkable skills at shading the truth or falsifying it altogether — is utterly devastating.

The “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the readout reveals — to use the Constitution’s term for impeachable offenses beyond “treason” and “bribery” (both of which the readout comes close to establishing) — begin with Trump abusing the foreign policy powers entrusted to the president by Article II in order to serve his own political interests rather than the interests of the American people.

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Those interests were defined here by a bipartisan decision of the Congress we elected to represent us in world affairs using its Article I spending power: Congress decided that it was in our nation’s security interest to provide nearly $400 million in aid to the beleaguered patriots of an American ally fighting a bloody battle with an American adversary. The ally was Ukraine. The adversary was Russia, which had — not so coincidentally — tried to help Trump win office in 2016.

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Even if this action weren’t payback to Russian President Vladimir Putin and yet another indication of how beholden Trump is to that brutal dictator — which it may well have been — it was a blatant usurpation of Congress’ Appropriation Clause authority for Trump to withhold the aid the Ukranians needed. When asked by Ukraine’s president in this July 25 phone call to purchase more Javelin missiles from the United States for defense purposes, Trump responded that he would gladly do so, although — he actually used the word “though” — he would greatly appreciate that foreign president’s aid in, among other things, gathering evidence to effectively help prosecute Trump’s main rival for the presidency in the forthcoming election.

Imagine the outrage, not to mention the judicial rebuke, that would have followed if Congress had overtly conditioned aid to a country being overrun by Russia upon that country’s agreement to apparently advance the political ambitions of the incumbent president! That this plainly unconstitutional condition was instead subtly interposed by Trump himself only makes the matter more egregious.

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In addition, despite the Department of Justice's conclusion to the contrary, the campaign assistance that Trump sought in implicit exchange for his releasing the funds Congress had appropriated and Ukraine desperately needed clearly violates the same federal laws governing our elections that the president arguably violated to get himself elected in the first place — namely, the statutes making it illegal for a candidate in an American election to solicit or accept anything “of value” from a foreign source.

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Making Trump’s lawlessness all the more egregious was his enlisting William Barr, the nation’s attorney general, to work with Trump’s own consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, in digging up dirt in Ukraine on former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the opposing party’s presidential nomination, and Biden’s surviving son, Hunter.

Never mind the cruelty and vindictiveness of selecting this particular target for his rage. Sadism is not an impeachable offense. Never mind the odds that the president’s hatred for his predecessor, President Barack Obama, probably drove his obsession with hurting Obama’s handpicked vice president. Envy isn’t impeachable either. And never mind that there is no credible evidence that Biden or his son violated any law. Even if they had, for a president to conscript the highest law enforcement official in the land, one paid by and legally bound to serve the American people, to do his personal and political bidding in an effort not only to smear but to also criminally prosecute a political foe is the stuff of novels about banana republics, not of the America I know and whose Constitution and laws I have spent a lifetime defending.

The least of it is that using personnel paid by American taxpayers, whether civilians like Barr or military personnel like the pilots involved in landing at the Scottish airfield near Trump’s failing golf course, is a way of supplementing his congressionally fixed compensation in violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause of Article II. Worse than that is any president’s very decision to turn the Department of Justice into his personal law firm and weaponizing it against his political opponents, one of many violations of the president’s Oath of Office.

Whatever other evidence the House impeachment inquiry launched by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday might uncover, we already know enough to say: Donald J. Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors against the United States and must be impeached.

Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and co-author of “To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.” Follow him on Twitter: @tribelaw