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  Whereas Mueller’s report could not prove collusion, in this case there is no doubt President Trump tried to collude with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—because we have notes from the call, released by President Trump himself, demonstrating our president doing exactly that.

  Whereas much of Mueller’s report focused predominantly on President Trump’s conduct prior to taking office (which meant he wasn’t beholden to the Pence Standard), the Ukraine scandal is about the actions Donald Trump has taken as president, our most powerful official.

  Why is that distinction important? Well, in 2016, Trump had to look up to the sky and ask Russia to hack Secretary Clinton’s emails without having anything specific to offer in return (so far as we know, anyway). In 2019, by contrast, with the full imprimatur of being our head of state and with millions of dollars in military aid to withhold or dole out, he called up the president of Ukraine directly and made the request for him to interfere in our elections—knowing he could use the power of the purse of the United States as leverage.

  What’s more, whereas Mueller’s report didn’t contain any smoking-gun evidence of coordination between Trump and Russia, we have concrete evidence of President Trump asking Ukraine to do him a “favor” in exchange for help procuring weapons.

  And we have a transcript of a text from Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat to Ukraine, saying that “it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” as well as testimony from Ambassador Taylor confirming that this is what Trump was doing. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney went so far as to admit from the White House briefing room that there was a quid pro quo (“something for something”) exchange between President Trump and President Zelensky—before eventually trying to walk it back. And while you’ll soon learn that a quid pro quo is not necessary at all for impeachment, there’s no doubt that President Trump’s blatant solicitation of a bribe adds to the case for his impeachment, in a way nothing in the Mueller report ever did.

  Moreover, not only do we have transcripts of, texts about, and witnesses to the president’s most recent crimes—including Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who heard the call himself—but we also have repeated confessions from the president himself in the public record. Whereas he cried “no collusion” throughout Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, President Trump is issuing no such denials about Ukraine. “I have an absolute right,” he has tweeted, “to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!”

  President Trump knows there’s no hiding his coordination with Ukraine—so instead of denying it, he’s defending it. And he’s doubling down, asking China to join Ukraine in investigating Vice President Biden as well. That’s because President Trump believes his best strategy for surviving this scandal is to pretend it’s not a big deal, and he’s betting that his supporters will go along with his story.

  This is the approach of a man who believes he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing any voters. The question is whether he’s right—whether Americans will be too blinded by partisanship to see what President Trump has done. Or to care.

  That could very well be the case, but I wrote this book because I am not ready to give up on the American people; and because I believe that if we fail to hold President Trump accountable for what he did in 2019—for what he’s doing right now—we might lose our democracy altogether in 2020.

  That’s not only because I worry about foreign influence on our elections; it’s also because I am afraid of the standard we would set for future presidents if we fail to impeach this one. If we allow President Trump to commit a paradigmatic impeachable offense—one of the very high crimes our Constitution was designed to prevent—then we will set a precedent that our commander in chief cannot be held accountable. And in a world where the Constitution makes the president all-powerful—in charge of the world’s largest treasury and the world’s strongest army—an unconstrained presidency is a constitutional monstrosity.

  As Edmund Randolph said at the Constitutional Convention, “The Executive will have great opportunities of abusing his power.” One of the only ways for him to be stopped, the founders understood, was through removal—which means that if impeachment is effectively written out of our Constitution (as Trump’s lawyers have urged), the president of the United States will effectively be above the law.

  To crystallize this point: if Congress does not impeach President Trump, President Nixon’s infamous answer to David Frost—“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”—will transform from being a much-derided overstatement of executive power to being a statement of fact. Not only will future presidents feel emboldened to invite foreign influence into our democracy, they will believe they can commit any crime at all—even (or especially) one that helps them get reelected. And if the precedent set by the failure to impeach Trump is any indication, they will be right.

  That is a price all of us—Republicans and Independents and Democrats alike—must be unwilling to pay.

  Why You Should Read This Book

  I also wrote this book because impeachment isn’t meant to be conducted solely in late-night meetings on Capitol Hill, in war room discussions around the Resolute desk, or in overnight strategy sessions at DC law firms.

  Yes, the House will ultimately vote on impeachment and the Senate will vote on removal, but in America, our elected officials don’t represent themselves. They represent the people. And the only way they will be courageous enough to impeach President Trump is if their constituents demand they perform their duty as a check on the executive branch and remove him from office.

  Now, I don’t want you to simply take my word on whether the president has committed a high crime. My goal with this book isn’t to convince you that President Trump should be impeached, though I do make the case. It’s to provide you with the information you need to decide for yourself.

  All I ask is that you apply the same yardstick to President Trump that you would to President Obama. As I mentioned earlier, I call this the Yardstick Rule, and it’s really simple: you just ask yourself, in a moment of brutal honesty, what you would do if the political parties were reversed. Just close your eyes and imagine President Obama had done what President Trump did—if he’d asked Iran, for instance, to dig up dirt on Mitt Romney. If you are a Democrat, would you have supported impeachment? If you are a Republican, would you?

  Over the course of this book, I will provide you with all the facts you need to make that determination—not only about President Trump and Ukraine but about the history of impeachment: about why it was included in our Constitution, how it has been enforced throughout our history, and where all of that leaves us today.

  Of course, new information may very well be revealed between when this book was written and when you read it, but the story told here, with the facts already at our disposal, is all you need to decide for yourself whether or not President Trump should be impeached. It doesn’t matter why military aid was withheld for a time. It doesn’t matter whether Ukraine did in fact open up an investigation into Hunter Biden. All that matters is that President Trump asked for Ukraine’s help in compromising a political rival, without the American public knowing about it. My answers to the other questions, like whether there was a quid pro quo (there was) and whether there was a cover-up (there was), are gravy. The central issue here is the one we’ve known about since September 2019: President Trump’s solicitation of election interference from a foreign power.

  So keep your eye on the ball and don’t get distracted by sideshows. Impeaching a president, by design, is hard. It will require the unwavering focus of the American people. This book is designed to show you what to focus on and what questions to ask.

  In Chapter 1, I discuss the origins of impeachment: why our founders included it in our Constitution, how it’s defined, and when it’s been used against past presidents. In Ch
apter 2, I examine the evidence available to us with regard to President Trump’s conduct with Ukraine, and in Chapter 3, I explain why I believe the only viable remedy is impeachment. In Chapter 4, I answer some of the most commonly asked questions about impeachment, from how it works (it’s complicated) to how long it takes (it depends)—and respond to the most common defenses of President Trump’s actions. And in Chapter 5, I contemplate what America would look like after the impeachment of President Trump and what laws we could pass to ensure that no president can abuse their power in the same way again.

  Ultimately, I believe that America will not be saved by our Constitution, or our laws, or even our elected officials. If our country survives this crisis, it will be because of Americans like you, Americans who remember that our government is meant to be of, by, and for the people—and stand up to declare that no one is above the law.

  Not even the president of the United States.

  1

  A Brief History of Impeachment

  The case against President Trump did not begin when he asked Ukrainian president Zelensky to do him a favor in 2019.

  No, the case against President Trump began long before he ever took the oath of office; long before he decided to run for president; long before he was born.

  The case against President Trump began at the very founding of our country—when 56 colonists came together to declare they would never again be ruled by an executive with unchecked power. To be exact: The case against President Trump began on July 4th, 1776.

  That Time We Impeached King George III

  Decades before Congress filed the first articles of impeachment, our founders drafted the Declaration of Independence.

  The Declaration is remembered today for its opening lines—about self-evident truths, about all men being created equal, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Children memorize these paragraphs in elementary school classrooms. Civil rights leaders, marching for liberty, have invoked them throughout our history. Politicians across our country, from every party, wax poetic about those opening words.

  And yet—few could tell you what comes next.

  After the soaring rhetoric in its opening lines, the Declaration of Independence transitions into a list of “repeated injuries and usurpations” caused by Britain’s King George III. The first one is haunting: “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” And so are the 26 additional offenses our founders delineate, ranging from “[obstructing] the Administration of Justice” to “[refusing] to cause others to be elected.”

  “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant,” the signers conclude, “is unfit to be the ruler of free people.” No longer, they declared, would they bow to King George III, because the United States would be, from that moment onward, “Free and Independent.”

  In this way, the Declaration amounts to what could be considered America’s first articles of impeachment. So it’s no surprise that when it came time for our founders to write a constitution of their own, one of their central objectives was ensuring that our country would never be ruled by someone asserting kinglike powers again. As Benjamin Franklin explained, referring to George Washington, “The first man put at the helm will be a good one.” But, he added, “Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.” “The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere,” he warned, “till it ends in a monarchy.”

  That belief, shared among our founders, is the reason they included so many checks and balances on presidential powers and prerogatives in our Constitution. It’s why, in the Constitution’s first article, they created Congress—so the legislative branch could check the executive, whose creation came only later, in Article II. It’s why they split Congress into two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate, so no one body would have too much power. And, to create what James Madison called a “double security,” it’s also why they divided power between the central government and states.

  Our founders’ fear of any individual person having too much power also led to the establishment of judicial review—and to fixed terms of office, which ensured that the president of the United States would be subject to elections every four years, instead of being granted open-ended government service.

  Every single one of these checks and balances was designed, at least in part, to prevent America from devolving into the very kind of monarchical government from which our country declared its independence. But in the summer of 1787, our founders realized that even these checks were not enough—because any president could simply decide to ignore them. That meant our country needed another tool to hold our president accountable: impeachment.

  The Constitutional Convention

  The Constitutional Convention began in May, but the question of impeachment didn’t come into focus until two months later—on July 20, 1787. On that hot summer day, two of the convention’s delegates, Charles Pinckney and Gouverneur Morris, laid out the case against Congress having the power to remove a president from office. Their belief was simple: If a president were so bad, wouldn’t he simply lose his next election? Why, they asked, would you ever need to preempt the will of the people?

  These were important questions, but Charles and Gouverneur’s fellow delegates had answers. George Mason in particular had a knack for tearing down any arguments opposing impeachment. “Shall any man be above justice?” he exclaimed. “Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice? . . . Shall the man who has practised corruption & by that means procured his appointment in the first instance,” he concluded, “be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?”

  In other words, without the protection of impeachment, what would stop a president from committing crimes to win office—particularly if he knew that he would have full immunity afterward?

  Mason sometimes operated as a one-man idea factory, but he had supporters this time. Here, crucially, James Madison, a chief architect of the Constitution, agreed with him on the floor of the convention. The president, Madison warned, “might lose his capacity after his appointment. He might pervert his administration into a scheme of [embezzlement] or oppression.” Or, he added, in words with special resonance today, “he might betray his trust to foreign powers.” Only impeachment, he believed, could protect our country from a president guilty of offenses like these.

  William Richardson Davie, from North Carolina, made a similar point, warning that an unimpeachable president might just “spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself reelected.”

  The debate went on for a while. Rufus King, a delegate from Massachusetts, was left unconvinced by Madison’s argument. As historian Jill Lepore writes, King, like Morris, “worried that the independence of the executive branch would be lost if the threat of impeachment were wielded by the legislative branch and held over the President.”

  But while King had a point, the delegates were ultimately more receptive to an argument made by Elbridge Gerry. “A good magistrate will not fear [Congress],” Gerry said. “A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.”

  At one point, as tensions grew between those who supported impeachment and those who did not, Benjamin Franklin, whose remarks often carried more weight than those of anyone else present, quieted the room. “What was the practice before this in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious?” Franklin asked, before providing a chilling and brief answer to his own question: “Assassination.”

  While Franklin understood impeachment could be burdensome, he believed that a legal mechanism for removing a public official was all that stood between our democracy devolving into anarchy the moment a president was deemed by the people to be unfit for office.

  By the end of the day, Gerry, Madison, Mason, and Franklin had convinced the majority of the convention that impeachment should in fact be included in the Constitution. As Lepore writes, “Even Gouverneur Morris had come around and changed h
is mind.” In America, Morris concluded, “The people are the king.” And so no one, not even our president, would be above the law.

  How Impeachment Would Work

  Over the following months, as the delegates determined how impeachment would work, they turned to an unlikely source for inspiration: the British.

  The king of England, of course, could never be impeached, but Parliament did have a protocol for removing his ministers: the House of Commons was responsible for accusing officials, and then the House of Lords was responsible for trying them. While our founders were no fans of the British government, they thought this system worked well, so they devised a similar procedure for the United States.

  The House of Representatives would investigate, and if the majority of the body agreed with charging the president, they would send articles of impeachment to the Senate, where the president would be tried. Only if two-thirds of the Senate agreed that a president’s conduct was impeachable would he be removed from office. (As in criminal courts, the idea here is that the bar for conviction should be higher than the bar for indictment.)

  The division of powers when it came to impeachment, our founders felt, was important, because the two halves of the legislature were designed to work differently from one another. Members of the House, they believed, would more directly represent the people they served, while senators would represent their states. (Before the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, senators were selected by state legislatures, not the people.) This structural dichotomy between House and Senate is the basis of Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, which says that laws can be passed only if both Houses of Congress consent. (Even if 100 senators voted for a bill, it could never become law unless the House supported it too.) And a similar idea, based on Britain’s bicameral legislative structure, undergirded their “two to tango” requirement for impeachment.