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The House Intelligence Committee just released a report detailing all the evidence it uncovered during its investigation into President Donald Trump’s Ukraine policy. The bottom line: The Democrat-led panel believes there’s enough to impeach the president.
The committee spent weeks hearing testimony from 12 witnesses in public and conducting 17 closed-door depositions, all to understand if Trump purposely withheld about $400 million in military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky until Ukraine opened investigations into Joe Biden’s family and Democrats. Those interviews formed the backbone of the House Democrat-led impeachment inquiry that the House Judiciary Committee takes over this week.
The report is meant to inform the Judiciary Committee’s work as its members decide whether or not there is a case to impeach Trump. But lawmakers on that committee were already familiar with the facts due to the open hearings and their involvement with the inquiry from the beginning. There was little doubt before the report came out that the committee’s Democratic members would vote to impeach when their hearings are finished.
Still, the document will provide even more fodder and backup for those who want Trump out of office. It details how Trump knew about the hold on military aid and kept in touch with top officials — like US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — as to the progress of the Ukraine pressure campaign. Committee Republicans will also put out their own version, saying the entire process was unfair to Trump.
Which means the Democrat-drafted report isn’t so much a game changer as it is another bit of kindling in the roaring impeachment fire that threatens to engulf Trump’s presidency.
Read the House Intelligence Committee’s report on Ukraine and impeachment here or below.
