michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: House Democratic leaders have introduced two articles of impeachment against President Trump, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. My colleague Nick Fandos on the unseen fight among Democrats over whether two articles of impeachment was enough. It’s Wednesday, December 11. Nick, how would you characterize the impeachment inquiry that we have all watched playing out over the past few weeks?

nicholas fandos

So in an odd sense, there has been, for the last month or so, an air of inevitability about this inquiry, since Democrats decided to take it in the public and began holding fact-finding hearings, writing a written report that they released to the public, talking about the president’s pressure campaign on Ukraine. It seemed to all of us watching this closely that it was only going to end in one place, and that was with the impeachment of the president of the United States. But at the same time, privately, behind the scenes, there was a debate going on about one of the most fundamental unanswered questions about this. What exactly were they going to charge the president with? What was the case against him going to encompass?

michael barbaro

Right. What would be the articles of impeachment?

nicholas fandos

That’s right, the constitutional term for charges, prosecutorial charges brought by the House against the president.

michael barbaro

And what exactly is this debate? I mean, if there have been public hearings, if there has been a report, and if there’s a unified front on just about everything leading up to that, what exactly is the debate?

nicholas fandos

Well, so, to answer that question, you have to go back a little ways to the summer and early fall, before most of us ever heard about Ukraine and what Rudy Giuliani or President Trump were trying to accomplish there, when the debate in Congress as it had to do with impeachment was really centered on another set of facts, on another country, on another report, and that was —

archived recording 1 Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the investigating — archived recording 2 Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. archived recording 3 Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

nicholas fandos

— Bob Mueller, the special counsel, and his report on Russian election interference in the 2016 campaign and whether or not President Trump had illegally obstructed justice when he tried through various means to try and undercut or thwart that investigation.

michael barbaro

I remember that. We did a few episodes on the subject.

nicholas fandos

We did, although it’s easy to forget now. But Democrats spent months with Mueller’s report. There was very serious evidence before them that the president had, for instance, instructed his White House counsel to fire Mueller early in the investigation, had tried to instruct his attorney general to take control of the investigation again and curtail it so the president wasn’t in its sights. But as week after week went by, they struggled to figure out how to make it urgent, how to bring it to life, because the report, frankly, didn’t come to firm conclusions itself about legality. It was written in this kind of dense style that’s hard to penetrate for most people. And so the issue, as much as they tried, never quite caught on with the public.

archived recording (veronica escobar) That process other than the criminal justice system for accusing a president of wrongdoing, is that impeachment?

nicholas fandos

They put on a series of hearings, including with Mueller himself —

archived recording (robert mueller) I’m not going to comment on that.

nicholas fandos

— and still couldn’t unite their caucus around moving towards impeachment on this issue. And you started to see a not insubstantial number of Democrats who felt fervently that they should move forward with impeachment even if the public wasn’t fully on board with this.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

nicholas fandos

But enough were holding back that there was no way they were going to have the votes to make that happen, and Speaker Pelosi wasn’t going to fully let that happen. So that was basically the state of affairs this fall when, out of nowhere, an anonymous whistle-blower complaint fell into the lap of the House Intelligence Committee and, within a couple of weeks, turned out to be what we now know as the “Ukraine affair.”

michael barbaro

Right. And this suddenly unites just about all Democrats. It’s different.

nicholas fandos

It’s remarkable. In a very short period of time, you have moderate Democrats who were opposed, vocally opposed, to moving forward with an impeachment investigation based on the grounds of the Mueller report coming forward and enthusiastically volunteering not only that they’re O.K. with an inquiry, but if these charges, these suspicions are proven out to be true, they think the president should be outright impeached, that they should take the next step and go all the way there. And so there is an active group of progressive lawmakers that still want to see the Mueller case live on, that don’t want to completely set it aside. They’re forced to move that to the back burner for the two months that it ends up taking to investigate what really went down between the president and Ukraine.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) Therefore, today, I’m announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.

michael barbaro

And so, Nick, how does all of this that you have just told us relate to the question of, what would be the articles of impeachment brought against President Trump?

nicholas fandos

So as the facts of the Ukraine investigation become clearer, as they begin to crystallize as time goes on, the debate starts to naturally shift towards, O.K., so now, what are we going to do about it? We figured out what happened. What do we want to charge the president with? And as that discussion begins to happen around Ukraine articles, it becomes a natural time to say, hey, we’ve got this other thing, these developed set of facts, this investigation. It’s sitting on the back burner, good to go. Do we want to bring that in and marry it up? And in part, that’s a natural discussion as this process goes on, because there’s enough similarity between what’s being alleged in the Ukraine investigation, and particularly President Trump’s attempts to obstruct the House’s impeachment investigation with the earlier Mueller case, and the president trying to conceal his actions from another investigator.

michael barbaro

Right.

nicholas fandos

But as this process moves forward and comes back into the House Judiciary Committee, which is the panel that traditionally is tasked with drawing up articles of impeachment, with drawing up the charges to recommend what the House ought to do about it, this becomes a very live issue. This isn’t just academic anymore, because they have to decide in a matter of a couple weeks, what are we going to charge the president with? And so it’s in that context in the last couple of weeks that Speaker Nancy Pelosi starts to more directly turn to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, her kind of top lieutenants in the House, to start debating this problem. And it really culminates in a meeting in the speaker’s office last Thursday.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. So, Nick, what happens last Thursday?

archived recording (nancy pelosi) The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our election.

nicholas fandos

So Thursday morning, as you may remember, Speaker Pelosi goes out before television cameras, and addresses the nation, and says —

archived recording (nancy pelosi) The facts are uncontested.

nicholas fandos

At this point, we have seen enough evidence.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) Today, I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment.

nicholas fandos

And I’m directing my House chairmen to begin drafting articles of impeachment.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

nicholas fandos

Well, a few hours later, Pelosi meets with those chairmen in her office suite. It’s already decorated for Christmas. They all sit around a wooden dining room table. There’s a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down at them. And here are the key players sitting around that table — there’s Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who oversaw the earlier investigation into Bob Mueller’s findings and was the one leading the push towards discussing impeachment around it. He’s the one who’s now going to be tasked with having to move these articles over the finish line. There’s Richie Neal. He’s the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Democrat from Massachusetts, who is going after the president’s tax returns, as it happens, but doesn’t have a particular dog in this fight. There’s Maxine Waters of California from the Financial Services Committee; Carolyn Maloney, the new Oversight Committee chairwoman; Eliot Engel, who’s the Foreign Affairs chairman, other New Yorker; and then Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman who led the Ukraine investigation and really had been the face of the impeachment inquiry for its first two months or so. So it’s clear pretty quickly that this group is divided about exactly how they ought to go forward.

michael barbaro

Hmm.

nicholas fandos

So Jerry Nadler speaks up. And he basically lays out a case for three articles of impeachment. Two of those have to do with Ukraine. And they are that the president abused the power of his office by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals for his own personal gain, that he conditioned official government acts to help himself, and then that he tried to conceal what had happened from Congress and took extraordinary steps to obstruct their impeachment inquiry. But then a third count of obstruction of justice based on the findings of the Mueller report.

michael barbaro

So he wants to bring back the Mueller report.

nicholas fandos

Exactly. And what he argues is, it’s important that we show a pattern of conduct by the president. Because what he was doing towards Ukraine and the efforts that he’s taken to try and conceal that scheme from Congress, that’s not completely new. Yes, the facts are unique to that case, but we’ve seen this president disregarding the rule of law, disregarding accountability, flagrantly messing with foreign countries as it relates to elections for a long time now, and I think our case is potentially strengthened if we build it out in that way. And by the way, we did a lot of work on this question of obstruction of justice, and it’s not good. And what message would it send if the House of Representatives were to impeach this president and not charge him based on that conduct?

michael barbaro

Right.

nicholas fandos

Does that set a precedent in and of itself?

michael barbaro

Right. And perhaps he just didn’t want to see all that work tossed aside.

nicholas fandos

Yeah, I think that that’s a possibility too. And Nadler gets some backup from some of the other chairs in the room. But then Richie Neal from Massachusetts speaks up. And he says something interesting. He says, we’d do well to remember what happened in 1998 when the Republicans, then in the House majority, impeached another president, Bill Clinton. And they recommended — the Judiciary Committee recommended four articles of impeachment on the House floor. But the Republicans couldn’t all hold together. And two of them failed, casting a kind of odd shadow over their case just as it headed to the Senate for a trial. And his argument essentially was, we ought to bring forward our strongest case and the case that unites us. We don’t want to run risks of putting up articles that might fail on the floor or bring down the strength of what we think this Ukraine case offers. And he’s thinking very much in his mind back to that debate during the summer and the early fall where Democrats really were not united around obstruction of justice and, I think, is fearful that that could happen on the floor and embarrass Democrats.

michael barbaro

So the fear that he’s identifying here is not that the third article of impeachment would fail when it gets to the Republican-controlled Senate, but that it actually might fail in the Democratically-controlled House.

nicholas fandos

Right. And that if it did, it would in some ways undermine the kind of seriousness of the Democrats’ whole case. Because if they’re already expecting not to pick up any Republican votes and this is going to be a party-line impeachment, it looks a heck of a lot worse if you see some Democrats saying, eh, we don’t even necessarily agree with all of these charges. And when many of those Democrats who were opposed to pursuing impeachment based on the Mueller grounds came out in favor of an impeachment inquiry around Ukraine, they made very clear that there was a distinction in their minds.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

nicholas fandos

And as this process has gotten closer towards the drafting of articles of impeachment, they’ve started popping back up and reminding any reporter that wants to listen that they still view those things as something different. And so Neal is cluing in on something very specific and very real here, and it resonates with others in the room. And then there’s Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman. And his argument is that after two months of fact-finding, this Ukraine matter that he’s been scrutinizing is something of a higher order, that is so urgent — has to do with the president’s behavior right now and affecting an ongoing election — that they really ought not let that get bogged down with earlier, hard-fought debates and an older set of facts, that it’s important to make the case to the American people that this is something different and the lights are flashing right now. And that is why the House is acting and why it’s justified in acting, i.e. voting on articles of impeachment. So with all of these different arguments swirling in the air and through a bunch of other conversations with her individual members, Speaker Pelosi is trying to make a final decision about how to go forward. People who are close to her say that she was always reticent to proceed on an obstruction of justice ground. But she wanted to hear out these arguments and see where her caucus was. But as time went on, it became clear that she identified with the arguments that people like Schiff and Neal were making and some of these freshmen moderate lawmakers were telling her directly, which is, we see Ukraine as something different. We really think this is where our attention ought to be focused. And so with all of that in mind, she begins to guide this group towards a narrower set of charges just around Ukraine, towards jettisoning obstruction of justice for now.

michael barbaro

So she is moving Democrats toward two articles of impeachment, not three.

nicholas fandos

That’s right. So by the end of the meeting last Thursday, the group, reluctantly for some, more enthusiastically for others, arrives at a kind of loose though not quite final agreement that it’s going to be two articles of impeachment, that they’re going to charge the president of the United States most likely with abuse of power and with obstruction of Congress, both having to do with Ukraine.

michael barbaro

And that means that Mueller is basically over as a matter of impeachment.

nicholas fandos

So they arrive at a small workaround, at a kind of gesture at these earlier investigations, including in each of the articles that Democrats ultimately draft language that points back to earlier attempts by President Trump to solicit foreign interference and to obstruct United States government investigations. But that’s as far as they go. They never mention Bob Mueller. They don’t mention obstruction of justice in particular. And so if we saw this — what was once a pretty hot debate moved onto the back burner earlier this fall, it seems now that they’re turning off the stove on it, that for all intents and purposes what was pretty compelling evidence to a lot of lawmakers is basically going to go without an explicit and specified consequence for the president. Now, there are some who will argue that we may not be where we are today, that the House wouldn’t have been ready to impeach Donald Trump on the Ukraine episode, on the Ukraine scheme, if this hadn’t come first, if they hadn’t seen the president behave in the ways that the Mueller report chronicled. But that may be in the eye of the beholder.

michael barbaro

So that pattern was meaningful for them. But in order to get to Ukraine and make Ukraine stick, something is sacrificed. And that is the Mueller investigation.

nicholas fandos

That’s right. And they want to be able to tell the larger story, to situate what happened in Ukraine in a larger story. But at the end of the day, what they decide is that we’re just going to charge the president based on what happened in these particular episodes.

michael barbaro

And that, of course, brings us to Tuesday morning.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) Good morning, everyone. On this solemn day, I recall that the first order of business for members of Congress is the solemn act to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

nicholas fandos

Tuesday morning at 9:00 a.m., after staffers for the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee stayed up overnight finalizing, tweaking these articles of impeachment, the six chairs that had gathered in Speaker Pelosi’s office over and over again met up with her, and they all gathered in a wood-paneled reception room just off the floor of the United States House chamber. They had four American flags behind them and a portrait of George Washington. And the speaker introduced the subject.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) I also want to thank the staff of those committees and the committee members for all of their work over this period of time to help us protect and defend. Now pleased to yield to distinguished chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Nadler.

nicholas fandos

And then Chairman Nadler came forth and said —

archived recording (jerry nadler) Thank you, Madam Speaker. Over the last several months, the investigative committees of the House have been engaged in an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s efforts to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 elections.

nicholas fandos

Here today, we have decided to pursue charges against the president of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanors. And he weighed out two counts, abuse of power —

archived recording (jerry nadler) That is exactly what President Trump did when he solicited and pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 presidential election.

nicholas fandos

— and obstruction of Congress.

archived recording (jerry nadler) A president who declares himself above accountability, above the American people, and above Congress’s power of impeachment, which is meant to protect against threats to our Democratic institutions, is a president who sees himself as above the law. We must be clear. No one, not even the president, is above the law. I want to recognize the great contributions of the investigative chairs, particularly —

nicholas fandos

And with that, President Trump has now become just the fourth president in American history to be staring down his likely impeachment by the House of Representatives for high crimes and misdemeanors.

[music]

michael barbaro

Nick, thank you.

nicholas fandos

Thank you, Michael.

archived recording (donald trump) Now, after two and a half years, now that the Russia witch hunt is dead, a big, fat, disgusting fraud, the congressional Democrats are pushing the impeachment witch hunt having to do with Ukraine.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday night, during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, President Trump mocked the articles of impeachment that Democrats plan to bring against him, specifically mentioning that there were just two of them.

archived recording (donald trump) This is impeachment lite. This is the lightest impeachment in the history of our country by far. It’s not even like an impeachment. These people are stone-cold crooked. But today, the —

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) This is a day we’ve all been working to and working for on the path to yes.

michael barbaro

Despite the rancor over impeachment, the president and House Democrats reached a rare agreement on Tuesday over a new trade deal between the U.S., Mexico and Canada that would replace Nafta.

archived recording (nancy pelosi) There is no question, of course, that this trade agreement is much better than Nafta.

michael barbaro