WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan condemns the idea of impeachment when it comes to President Donald Trump.

But twice in recent years, Jordan vigorously sought to impeach a pair of public officials whom he accused of offenses that seem minor in comparison to the accusations against Trump.

During those times, Jordan described impeachment as an “indispensable power that Congress has for holding government officials accountable.”

The Champaign County Republican is one of the nation’s most visible critics of efforts to impeach Trump, accusing Democrats of conducting a “sham inquiry" and a “deeply flawed and shameful partisan stunt” to oust a president they couldn’t defeat at the ballot box. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she’s asking committee chairs in the House of Representatives to “proceed with articles of impeachment.”

“The President has engaged in abuse of power undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi declared.

Jordan doesn’t think Trump should be impeached for asking Ukraine’s president to investigate a political rival while withholding $400 million in congressionally approved military aid, or for blocking congressional investigations into his conduct by refusing to turn over information and witnesses that Congress has subpoenaed. House Democrats have likened Trump’s conduct to bribery.

In 2015 and 2016, Jordan repeatedly urged impeachment of Internal Revenue Service commissioner John Koskinen because his agency had destroyed email backup tapes that Republicans in Congress sought to probe whether the Obama administration’s IRS deliberately delayed processing tax exemption requests from conservative groups.

And last year, Jordan led an effort to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, arguing that he intentionally withheld embarrassing documents and information from Congress, failed to comply with congressional subpoenas, and otherwise abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

While Jordan’s ejection efforts failed, neither of the public officials he targeted are still in office. Koskinen left when his term expired several months after Trump became president. Rosenstein left after Special Counsel Robert Mueller publicly released findings of his investigation of Russian interference the 2016 presidential election, whether Russia coordinated with Trump’s campaign, and whether Trump and his allies tried to obstruct the probe.

Dozens were indicted as a result of Mueller’s inquiry and several were sentenced to prison terms.

Multiple official examinations of how the IRS handled the tax exemption requests found no evidence of malicious or criminal behavior by IRS workers, but said they exercised poor judgment. Democrats noted IRS also held up tax exemption applications from liberal groups.

Jordan goes after the IRS

The Koskinen episode began in 2010, when IRS employees in Cincinnati gave extra scrutiny to tax exemption requests filed by a collection of groups that seemed political, many of which were Tea Party affiliates. Investigations by the Justice Department and a Treasury Department inspector general found no criminal wrongdoing, but Jordan and other Republicans kept pursuing Koskinen.

Koskinen did not head the IRS at the time the incidents occurred, and the official who was in charge of reviewing tax-exempt organizations when the disputed conduct happened - Lois Lerner - retired before Koskinen took office. After Koskinen took control of the agency at the end of 2013, he told Congress IRS preserved all evidence related to the Lerner probe, but later learned that workers doing routine maintenance had erased 422 backup tapes containing 24,000 emails that could have been submitted.

“From the start, I directed IRS staff to cooperate fully with Congress and to recover lost information where possible, and I testified to the best of my knowledge,” Koskinen told the House Judiciary Committee. “But the truth is that we did not succeed in preserving all of the information requested and some of my testimony later proved mistaken.”

Jordan faulted Koskinen for waiting four months to tell Congress about the destruction of the back-up tapes, and argued that he should be impeached because the agency continued to “target our fellow citizens for their political beliefs” under Koskinen’s watch and impeded efforts to investigate the problem.

Jordan, along with Dayton’s Mike Turner, Cincinnati’s Brad Wenstrup, Bowling Green’s Bob Latta, and Holmes County’s Bob Gibbs, were among 85 Republicans who co-sponsored a congressional resolution that sought Koskinen’s impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The resolution noted the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found over 1,000 of Lerner’s emails that IRS failed to produce by searching several sources, like disaster backup tapes, that the IRS didn’t examine in its own investigation.

In speeches on the House of Representatives floor, Jordan argued that if private citizens who were being audited by IRS discovered they were missing documents critical to the audit and waited four months to tell IRS about it, “they are definitely getting fined and they are probably going to jail.”

“But somehow, when it happens to John Koskinen, the Commissioner of the IRS, it is okay,” Jordan continued in a September 2016 speech. “It is not okay. It is not okay in this country. This is what frosts so many Americans today. There are now two standards in this country. One for we, the people, and a different one for the politically connected. One for us regular folks and a different one if your name is Lerner, Koskinen or Clinton. That is not supposed to be how it works in this country, not in the greatest nation ever, where we are all supposed to be treated equally under the law.”

Democrats, in pursuing their impeachment inquiry, have repeatedly expressed a similar sentiment about Trump -- that no one, not even the president, should be above the law.

The House of Representatives took a pass on Jordan’s bid to impeach Koskinen in a 342 to 72 vote that referred the bill to the House Judiciary Committee, which didn’t pursue Koskinen. Jordan and his fellow Freedom Caucus member Warren Davidson of Troy were the only Ohioans who voted against the referral.

“The right to pursue impeachment is an indispensable power that Congress has for holding government officials accountable to the American people," Jordan said at the time. "John Koskinen has been able to get away with stonewalling Congress, obstructing justice, and breaching the public trust. It’s time that Congress held him accountable for his actions.”

Other impeachment efforts

Jordan isn’t the only Trump impeachment foe in Ohio who has co-sponsored previous efforts to impeach public officials for not providing them with requested records. In 2013, Gibbs and Cincinnati’s Steve Chabot cosponsored a measure to impeach President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder.

They claimed Holder had committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” that included failing to comply with a congressional subpoena, failing to prosecute IRS workers they believed had disclosed tax records that belonged to political donors, and failing to enforce laws including the “Defense of Marriage Act” that was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Holder impeachment effort was referred to the Judiciary Committee, which ignored it.

Last year, Jordan and several of his Freedom Caucus colleagues introduced impeachment articles against then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump administration Republican who oversaw Mueller’s probe. They claimed Rosenstein withheld embarrassing documents and information from Congress, failed to comply with congressional subpoenas, and otherwise abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The disputed documents requested by congressional committees related to the Mueller investigation and a 2016 probe of Hillary Clinton.

“The DOJ is keeping information from Congress," Jordan said. "Enough is enough. It’s time to hold Mr. Rosenstein accountable for blocking Congress’s constitutional oversight role.”

The impeachment articles were filed after a testy exchange between Jordan and Rosenstein at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. When Jordan accused Rosenstein of trying to withhold information from Congress, Rosenstein said the Justice Department has a “team of folks” consisting of “hundreds of people working around the clock” who are “doing their best to produce these documents.” The impeachment measure was sent to the Judiciary Committee, which didn’t act on it.

The House Speaker at that time, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, said he opposed impeaching Rosenstein, and didn’t believe his conduct rose to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He also said the Justice Department made “tremendous progress” in providing documents Congress sought.

“I don’t think we should be cavalier with this process or with this term,” Ryan said of impeachment. “We all want to make sure that we get compliance, and different members have different beliefs on how best to go achieve those goals.”

The top Democrats on the House Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform Committees issued a joint statement that called the bid to impeach Rosenstein “a direct attack” on Mueller’s investigation.

“The President should not mistake this move by his congressional enablers as a pretext to take any action against Mr. Rosenstein or Mr. Mueller and his investigation,” said the statement from Adam Schiff of California, Jerrold Nadler of New York, and Elijah Cummings of Maryland. "Any attempt to do so will be viewed by Congress and the American people as further proof of an effort to obstruct justice with severe consequences for Trump and his presidency.”

Mr. Rosenstein, why are you keeping information from Congress?https://t.co/CcNQtSsT7s — Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) June 28, 2018

Obstruction charges have familiar ring

Just as Jordan called for impeaching public officials who didn’t supply the records sought for his investigations Democrats say they’re upset that Trump hasn’t provided the witnesses and documents their investigations sought. California’s Eric Swalwell, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, told reporters Trump has turned down 71 subpoena requests from Democrats, and instructed a dozen witnesses not to cooperate with investigators.

Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur told C-SPAN the lack of cooperation from administration officials “raises major red flags in my own mind.”

“I think that the issue of obstruction will probably weigh very heavily as the Judiciary Committee creates the actual articles of impeachment," said Kaptur. “Those witnesses should have come forward.”

At a Wednesday Judiciary Committee hearing, Nadler accused Trump of taking “extraordinary and unprecedented steps to cover up his efforts and to withhold evidence from the investigators." He noted that former President Richard Nixon supplied dozens of recordings to congressional investigators during 1974 a impeachment probe of the Watergate scandal, and former President Bill Clinton physically gave his blood in 1998 when investigators were probing his interactions with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“President Trump, by contrast, has refused to produce a single document and directed every witness not to testify,” said Nadler. “This Committee has voted to impeach two presidents for obstructing justice. We have voted to impeach one president for obstructing a congressional investigation ... “It does not matter that President Trump felt that these investigations were unfair to him. It matters that he used his office, not merely to defend himself, but to obstruct investigators at every turn.”

Jordan spokesman Ian Fury said the records Jordan wanted during past investigations were of the sort that are “part of standard congressional processes,” while “this impeachment has been anything but a standard impeachment process.”

“What the Democrats are doing is not in the standard procedure,” said Fury. “If this was a fair process, you would see more willingness from the White House to comply, but this is not a fair process.”

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