As Democrats move ahead with impeachment, Republicans insist Trump did not engage in ‘sinister mob shakedown’ with Ukraine

Democrats are poised to unveil two articles of impeachment on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress against Donald Trump, with an announcement expected early on Tuesday.

Reports on the move, citing anonymous sources, emerged on Monday night, following a meeting with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the judiciary committee chair, Jerry Nadler, and other senior Democrats. The House foreign affairs committee chair, Eliot Engel, told reporters at the conclusion of the meeting that he and other committee chairs planned to hold a 9am press briefing on Tuesday to announce specifics, according to the Washington Post. Earlier in the evening Pelosi, speaking at a Wall Street Journal event in Washington, said the final decision would rest with the committee leadership.

“They’ll make a determination, a recommendation as to how we will go forward and what the articles will be,” she said.

Following the drafting and approval of the articles, Trump could be impeached with a full House vote as early as next week, opening the way to a trial early next year in the Republican-led Senate.

The judiciary committee convened Monday’s hearing to summarize the evidence so far in the case against the president, which Republicans strained to short-circuit by insisting the president had not engaged in a “sinister mob shakedown” with Ukraine.

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“In abusing his office in this manner and in obstructing the investigation that followed, we know that President Trump has put himself before his country,” said Nadler, in remarks that closed the nine-and-a half-hour hearing.

“I am struck by the fact that my Republican colleagues have offered no serious scrutiny of the evidence at hand. They have talked about everything else, but they have offered not one substantive word in the president’s defense.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Trump supporter interrupts the House judiciary committee hearing on Capitol Hill on 9 December. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media

Democrats accuse Trump of abusing his power for his own political benefit and at the expense of US national security, by withholding military aid to Ukraine and an Oval Office meeting for its president in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into the former vice-president Joe Biden, his political rival.

Trump has denied wrongdoing. As Monday’s hearing proceeded, he tweeted “Read the Transcripts!” in reference to a White House summary of a 25 July phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which Trump has said was “perfect”.

Over the nearly three months of the impeachment inquiry, the two sides have mostly operated in parallel, calling separate sets of witnesses, shouting one another down and presenting diametrically opposed views not only of Trump’s motivations but of the basics of his conduct.

On Monday, the Republican lawyer Steve Castor brandished all of the party’s most controversial defenses of Trump, asserting that he was motivated by a genuine concern about corruption in Ukraine, that the inquiry had been hampered by the non-appearance of a whistleblower whose complaint launched it, and that Ukraine had committed tampering in US elections on par with Russia.

“Both countries can work to influence an election,” said Castor, in repetition of a Trump talking point that a previous impeachment witness called “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves”.

It was announced late on Monday that Trump and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, would meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, at the White House on Tuesday. Trump last met Lavrov in 2017, a day after firing James Comey as director of the FBI.

At times during the hearing, the tension between the sides erupted in scenes of procedural chaos, as Republicans interrupted testimony and Nadler pounded his gavel in an effort to move proceedings along.

“We have to have some decorum in here!” cried the Wisconsin congressman James Sensenbrenner, a Republican, after an interruption by a GOP colleague to complain about the “badgering” of a witness.

As Nadler hammered his gavel, Doug Collins, the top Republican on the committee, mocked him: “Bang it harder, it still doesn’t make the point that you’re not doing it right.”

Nadler blasted Trump for his decision, unprecedented among presidents facing impeachment proceedings, not to dispatch a lawyer to appear on his behalf before the committee or otherwise to participate in the investigation.

“President Trump chose not to show,” Nadler said. “He may not have much to say in his own defense, but he cannot claim that he did not have the opportunity to be heard.”

As Democrats erected once again a tower of testimony to support their case, Republicans tried to hold focus on the 25 July call and their narrow reading of it.

Castor argued that Trump’s request on the call that Zelenskiy investigate Biden was not a threat backed by official action and was not an attempt by Trump to advance his political self-interest.

“Simply put, the call is not the sinister mob shakedown that some Democrats have described,” Castor said.

But Democrats once again responded to Republican attempts to cast Trump’s conduct in a positive light with a barrage of testimony, text messages, news footage and other evidence documenting what they said was historic wrongdoing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Democratic House judiciary committee chair, Jerry Nadler, and the ranking Republican, Doug Collins, on Capitol Hill on Monday. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/AP

“The 25 July call was neither the start nor the end of President Trump’s efforts to use the powers of his office for personal political gain,” said Daniel Goldman, a lawyer for Democrats.

“President Trump’s persistent and continuing effort to coerce a foreign country to help him cheat to win an election is a clear and present danger to our free and fair elections and to our national security.”

A second Democratic lawyer, Barry Berke, said: “If what we’re talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable.”

In afternoon testimony, the California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell turned to a notorious line from Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings: “During Watergate, the famous phrase from Senator Howard Baker was asked – ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’

“There is a reason that no one here has repeated those questions during these hearings. We know what the president did and we know when he knew it,” Swalwell said.

The Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, meanwhile, sought to show that Trump’s freezing of Ukraine’s $391m military aid package was not because of concerns over corruption. “The president was perfectly fine giving military aid to Ukraine in 2017 and 2018 but somehow not in 2019. So what changed?”

“Joe Biden started running for president,” Goldman replied.

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In closing remarks for the Republicans, Collins repeated his party’s claim that impeachment was a sham perpetrated by the Democrats that was fast losing public support.

“If you look around the room, this is what’s happening to the American people,” he said. “By the end of the day, most in the back left, most of the members of the media are begging to go somewhere else, because at the end of the day, your case isn’t made.”

The final words, however, belonged to Nadler. “We know that the president was at the center of a scheme to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation of the president’s political rivals,” he said.

“He applied that pressure by withholding both a White House meeting and vital military aid. Such conduct is clearly impeachable. This committee will proceed accordingly.”