Impeach Read online

  The phone call did not come immediately, but Giuliani refused to let up. “Shortly after President Zelensky’s inauguration, it was publicly reported that Mr. Giuliani met with two other Ukrainian officials,” both of whom “are allies of Mr. Lutsenko and made similar allegations,” wrote the whistleblower. And after months of laying the groundwork, Giuliani finally organized a phone call between President Zelensky and President Trump. The rest, as they say, is history.

  Though I should note that things have only gotten worse for Giuliani since the complaint was released.

  As two of his aides were arrested for their work in Ukraine, Giuliani declined to respond to subpoenas in Congress, and reports indicate that he is under both counterintelligence and law enforcement investigations.

  Regardless of what happens next with Rudy Giuliani—or with the investigation into President Trump writ large—the three events the whistleblower used to end his report tell you all you need to know about Giuliani’s efforts to encourage Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 presidential election; and from whom he was taking orders.

  The whistleblower wrote:

  “On 13 June, the President told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would accept damaging information on his political rivals from a foreign government.”

  “On 21 June, Mr. Giuliani tweeted: ‘New Pres of Ukraine still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 and alleged Biden bribery of Poroshenko. Time for leadership and investigate [sic] both if you want to purge how Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Clinton people.’”

  “In mid-July, I learned of a sudden change of policy with respect to U.S. assistance for Ukraine.”

  President Trump’s Shifting Defenses

  As soon as the whistleblower’s report was released, President Trump began fighting back against its accusations, but Trump and his allies had already been preemptively defending their actions.

  “The reality is the president of the United States has every right to say to a leader of a foreign country, ‘You got to straighten up before we give you a lot of money,’” Giuliani had said in an interview on September 22, days before the transcript was released. “It is perfectly appropriate,” he continued, for Trump “to ask a foreign government to investigate this massive crime that was made by a former Vice President.”

  The following day, in a conversation with reporters at the United Nations, President Trump stayed on message. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?” he said. “So it’s very important that on occasion you speak to somebody about corruption.”

  The argument fell apart. At the Supreme Court, there’s a moment in an oral argument when you can see an advocate’s entire case collapse because they can’t answer a devastating question without resorting to platitudes or nonsense. That’s exactly what happened here. CNBC reporter Eamon Javers asked President Trump, “Have you asked foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponents?” Trump’s answer: “You know, we would have to look, but I tell you—what I ask for, and what I always will ask for, is anything having to do with corruption with respect to our country.” The dissembling was evident, just as in a bad Supreme Court argument.

  Nobody, of course, would object to President Trump investigating corruption, but even members of his own party doubted the legitimacy of this argument. “When the only American citizen President Trump singles out,” Republican senator Romney later tweeted, “is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated.” This time it was a member of his own party saying that Trump had failed to follow the Yardstick Rule.

  Making matters worse, Senator Romney’s comments rang especially true, noted Samantha Vinograd, a former member of the National Security Council staff, because President Trump had recently cut the State Department’s budget for fighting corruption around the world. “In the fiscal year 2019,” she explained, “the bureau was granted $5 million, but State requested $3 million for fiscal year 2020 . . . If the president were really concerned about corruption in Ukraine,” she concluded, “he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should have requested more resources.”

  The corruption argument also didn’t pass muster because President Trump’s administration had just written an official letter to Congress declaring “that the Government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions . . . for the purposes of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, and sustaining improvements of combat capability enabled by US assistance.” This letter, verifying Ukraine’s efforts to combat corruption, is what provided Congress with a green light to send aid to Ukraine for yet another year in the first place. And it defies belief to assume that the Trump Administration did a 180 on its position regarding Ukrainian corruption in a few months, especially when Ambassador Taylor testified that there would have been no reason to do so.

  The last reason the corruption defense doesn’t work is that, according to Ambassador Taylor’s testimony, President Trump asked President Zelensky to open up these investigations publicly (and on CNN specifically). If our president authentically cared about ending corruption in Ukraine, he would have had President Zelensky launch confidential investigations—interviewing sources, flipping witnesses, and trying to get to the truth—as law enforcement does day in and day out. I’ve worked on several law enforcement investigations, including some of the most sensitive ones. The one thing you don’t do is publicly announce what you are doing. But President Trump didn’t want a real investigation into the 2016 election and Vice President Biden. He wanted President Zelensky to make a statement about an investigation, which is simply not how you conduct a law enforcement operation. The demand for a public statement gave away the game.

  Eventually President Trump realized that the corruption defense wouldn’t be sufficient, so he offered up a new reason for why he had withheld the funding: Europe, he claimed, had not been contributing its fair share to aid in Ukraine. So, he asked, why would the United States carry its weight? “I’ll continue to withhold [the funding],” Trump declared at the United Nations General Assembly, “until such time as Europe and other nations contribute to Ukraine, because they’re not doing it.”

  Perhaps this argument would have distracted everyone for a bit if President Trump had not released the summary of his call with Zelensky the following day, which revealed that this wasn’t about Europe’s contributions to Ukraine’s defense budget after all. For a few hours Trump simply ignored the backlash and insisted that the call had been “perfect.” But when the whistleblower’s report was declassified the next morning, Trump’s allies wedded themselves to a yet another new defense: “hearsay.”

  As Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted, “In America you can’t even get a parking ticket based on hearsay testimony. But you can impeach a president? I certainly hope not.”

  Two days later President Trump embraced this argument himself: “The so-called ‘Whistleblower’ has all second hand information,” he tweeted. In audio from a private event published by the Los Angeles Times, President Trump went so far as to say he believed the whistleblower should be treated like a “spy.” “He never saw the call,” Trump exclaimed, before repeating it again: “He never saw the call.”

  “They’re almost a spy,” he continued, referring to the whistleblower. And he added that whoever had shared information with the whistleblower in the first place was “close to a spy” as well. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now,” he concluded. The way “we” used to “handle” spies, of course, was by executing them.

  The challenge with Trump’s “hearsay” defense was that so much of the whistleblower’s report already had been corroborated by authoritative sources. Indeed, the transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky didn’t have a single discrepancy with the w
histleblower’s description of it. In fact, it showed Trump doing the very thing—asking a foreign power to investigate his political opponent—the whistleblower had alleged.

  Whistleblowers, in my experience, sometimes get things wrong. They have only limited information and sometimes succumb to the all-too-human tendency to exaggerate. But this whistleblower was different: everything he said turned out to be verified by other sources, including, ultimately, by President Trump himself.

  This isn’t like receiving a parking ticket based on hearsay, as Senator Graham alleged. It’s like receiving a speeding ticket based on a speedometer, a camera, and an admission from the driver that he was speeding.

  Left without any evidence that the whistleblower’s report had been fabricated—and with fear that another whistleblower, who did have firsthand accounts of Trump’s actions, would come forward—Trump pivoted once again, adopting his most novel approach yet: defending his actions. “I have an absolute right,” he tweeted, as I mentioned in the introduction, “to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out.”

  Trump brought this message directly to the lawn of the White House, where he once again called on Ukraine to “investigate the Bidens” and, for good measure, shared his belief that “China should start an investigation into the Bidens” as well.

  Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney distilled this message of President Trump’s into a three-word phrase, “Get over it,” which was later plastered on Trump campaign shirts.

  President Trump has clearly come to believe that the best defense for his actions is doing them in public. Why, he hopes voters will ask, would Trump be doing this in public if it were illegal? This is the political equivalent of shoplifting a TV from a Best Buy and holding it above your head as you walk out of the store, hoping no one will question your behavior because you’re acting so brazenly.

  This Trump gambit—do it in public so no one cares—can be successful only for as long as our elected officials let it be. Forthrightness, once your crimes have been revealed, has nothing to do with whether you committed an impeachable offense. (Especially since President Trump’s whole plan was to try to do this in secret—until he was caught red-handed.) If asking a foreign power to investigate a political opponent is a “high crime or misdemeanor,” it shouldn’t matter to Congress whether President Trump did it in public or in private.

  That, perhaps, is why Trump pivoted once again and shifted to an even more grandiose tactic, one reminiscent of President Nixon’s: refusing to cooperate with the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry entirely.

  When Speaker Pelosi opened that inquiry, President Trump declared that he wouldn’t provide the House with documents its members requested. He tried to block a key witness, Ambassador Sondland, from testifying before Congress. Later that same day, President Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sent a letter (which you can find in the appendix) to Speaker Pelosi announcing that President Trump would not participate in the probe. “In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the executive branch and all future occupants of the office of the presidency,” Cipollone wrote, “President Trump and his administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances.”

  Executive privilege, Cipollone’s letter erroneously argued, provides the president with immunity from indictment, criminal charges, and even, in this case, impeachment. This resistance and obstruction is the very approach President Nixon took to his impeachment inquiry—an approach that led to his resignation.

  Whether President Trump’s fate will be the same remains to be seen. But this much is clear: President Trump believes he’s above the law. And only Congress—with the American people behind it—has the power to prove him wrong.

  In the next chapter, I’ll tell you why we must.

  3

  The Case Against President Trump

  If you’ve read the preceding chapters, you’ve seen that our founders believed we would be called to impeach a president who abused the public trust. And you’ve read about how President Trump has done exactly that. In this chapter, I connect the dots—explaining why President Trump’s actions have left us with no choice but to remove him from office.

  Whether or not you agree with my conclusion, I hope Americans from all parties will at least recognize that although the impeachment of President Trump may be conducted by politicians, it shouldn’t be political. This isn’t about what’s best for Democrats or Republicans. It’s about what’s best for America.

  Make no mistake: I believe the costs of removing President Trump from office are high. I worry doing so will further divide an already divided country. I fear President Trump’s response to being impeached—and wonder whether he would rather stoke violence than accept Congress’s decision. I feel for all the citizens who put their trust in President Trump and have been frustrated by those who have stymied his agenda. And I know our democracy might not recover from the removal of a duly elected president for a long time.

  But as dangerous as President Trump’s impeachment may very well be for our country, I believe it’s nothing compared to the danger of letting a president like him off the hook.

  Here’s why:

  The Pence Standard

  The president of the United States has more power than any other human being on the planet—power our current commander in chief has deployed not to serve our country but to serve himself. In this way, he is precisely the kind of leader our Constitution’s impeachment process was designed to remove, one who, to quote Vice President Pence, “put [his] own interests, [his] personal interests, ahead of public service.”

  That’s the Pence Standard, and there’s a reason it’s one of the epigraphs of this book. Because Vice President Pence’s distillation of what constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor is exactly in line with the founders’ conception of the term. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, impeachment was reserved for “those offenses which proceed from . . . the abuse or violation of some public trust . . . as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Like Vice President Pence, Hamilton believed Congress would be obligated to impeach the president only when he wielded the powers of his office for the benefit of himself instead of for the benefit of the people. That is the standard against which we will measure President Trump’s conduct over the course of this chapter, one set by his own vice president. And, again and again, he will fail to meet it.

  The Simple Case for Impeachment

  There are so many strands to this story—so many interwoven tales filled with words like “interference” and “obstruction”—but the case against President Trump is simple.

  He has:

  Abused the public trust by soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election;

  Abused the public trust by engaging in bribery—repeatedly—through his quid pro quo exchanges with President Zelensky of Ukraine;

  Abused the public trust by obstructing justice into the investigations of his conduct, adopting an unconstitutional view of executive power;

  And worst of all:

  He has promised to do it all again.

  Unless we stop him.

  High Crime #1: Soliciting Foreign Interference

  President Trump asked President Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Vice President Joe Biden. This, alone, would be reason enough to impeach him.

  Why? Well, let’s be as generous as possible in our interpretation of what took place. Let’s assume President Trump hadn’t engaged in a quid pro quo (“something for something”) exchange of any kind with President Zelensky, even though he did. Let’s further assume he had lifted his hold on military aid to Ukraine before the call and had agreed to a White House meeting with President Zelensky in advance, even though in reality he didn’t do either of those things. And let’s assume Ukraine said no to the request to open u
p an investigation into Vice President Biden, even though President Zelensky did just the opposite on his phone call with President Trump.

  President Trump would still have asked for help from a foreign power. And even if Trump’s plan completely failed and Ukraine never did a thing, the offense of solicitation would have been committed.

  That’s because, in the law, solicitation is what is called an inchoate crime, which means the offer itself is the criminal act, regardless of whether or not it is accepted. And solicitation encompasses everything from offering to pay someone for prostitution to asking someone to commit murder.

  Solicitation is a common criminal act, but President Trump’s offense is a particularly dangerous form of it because he did everything he could to ensure that the American people would never find out about it—which, while good for him personally, meant that he opened himself up to blackmail. That is more than a crime. It’s a massive abuse of the public trust—and therefore a clear impeachable offense.

  Think about the leverage he gave Ukraine. “If you don’t double our aid, or triple it, or quadruple it,” Zelensky could have said, “then I’ll tell the American people you sought to obtain foreign assistance in your election. And I’ll look good, because I declined to give it to you.”

  Indeed, if the whistleblower had not revealed Trump’s scheme, President Zelensky could have asked him for any favor under the sun and expected him to deliver on it, even if President Trump needed to undermine the interests of the United States to do it. That’s why, regardless of whether Ukraine accepted Trump’s request, his actions would still have warranted impeachment—because he would have jeopardized our national security either way.