The whistle-blower’s complaint has given Democrats a road map for impeachment hearings against President Trump. Photograph by Ting Shen / Xinhua / eyevine / Redux

The anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint that the House Intelligence Committee released on Thursday morning is a straightforward and clearly written document. In nine pages, with footnotes, it alleges that Donald Trump, with his sidekick Rudolph Giuliani, was involved in a flagrant abuse of Presidential power for personal gain (precisely the sort of behavior that James Madison and his colleagues were concerned about when they insisted upon including an impeachment clause in the U.S. Constitution) and that White House lawyers tried to cover up some of Trump’s behavior, particularly the contents of a call he had with Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, on July 25th. Furthermore, the document implicates Vice-President Mike Pence and casts Attorney General William Barr as a significant player in the Ukraine caper.

The complaint, which is dated from August 12th, was written in the form of a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. After referencing a statute that protects whistle-blowers from retaliation, the author, who is apparently an intelligence officer with access to interagency communications, gets right to the point: “In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. The interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

Read More Susan B. Glasser on the forty-eight hours that sealed Trump’s impeachment.

The whistle-blower goes on to discuss, in detail, the July 25th call, in which Trump told Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor,” and then went on to urge him to investigate Ukraine’s possible involvement in the 2016 U.S. election and to speak with Giuliani about former Vice-President Joe Biden’s role in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor. “The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call,” the whistle-blower writes. “They told me that there was already a ‘discussion ongoing’ with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”

Watch: Joseph Maguire testifies on Trump, the Ukraine call, and the whistle-blower.

The next section of the complaint details the alleged coverup:

In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to “lock down” all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House Situation Room. . . . White House officials told me that they were ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for co-ordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials. Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.

So there you have it. The crime—a glaring perversion and desecration of Presidential power—and the coverup, both handed neatly to Congress. Except, of course, that the complaint didn’t get there for weeks. Joseph Maguire, the acting director of National Intelligence, had, on the legal advice of the Justice Department, refused to forward it until after its existence had been leaked, at which point all hell had already broken loose. With the fires raging, Maguire testified before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday morning and defended his actions. He pointed out that the whistle-blower’s allegations about a coverup were secondhand, and said, “I have no knowledge if that is a true and accurate statement.”

Read More Why the whistle-blower complaint is the work of democracy, not the deep state.

What now? After months of looking for something specific to pin on Trump, the Democrats have a detailed road map for their previously announced impeachment hearings. Their investigators will certainly follow up on the suggestion that there was a coverup, but they will be even more focussed on the issue of whether Trump used the threat of withholding U.S. military aid to extort the Ukrainian government. “On 18 July, an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official informed Departments and Agencies that the President ‘earlier this month’ had issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine,” the final paragraph of the complaint says. “Neither OMB nor NSC staff knew why this instruction had been issued. During interagency meetings on 23 July and 26 July, OMB officials again stated explicitly that the instruction to suspend this assistance had come directly from the President, but they still were unaware of a policy rationale.”

In retrospect, it seems perfectly clear what that rationale was: Trump was using taxpayer money, which Congress had appropriated, to put the squeeze on Zelensky and gain an advantage in the 2020 election. The whistle-blower’s complaint doesn’t prove that this happened, but what other explanation can there be? Both in its contents and in what it has unleashed, the complaint is devastating for Donald Trump. Or, at least, it should be.