With the release of the Ukraine report from the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Chair Adam Schiff and his colleagues laid out the damning case for impeaching President Donald Trump in excruciating detail. Much of it, however, has been publicly known as transcripts of the inquiry depositions and public hearings revealed the key facts of Trump’s effort to induce Ukraine into investigating his political rivals while withholding military aid and White House meeting.
But because of Trump’s stonewalling — which itself features as a pillar of the president’s misconduct in the report — Republicans have argued that Schiff and the Democrats haven’t persuasively made the case that Trump was a part of the effort to leverage official acts in exchange for the political investigations. While extensive evidence strongly suggests that Trump was at the center of the scheme, not one witness’ testimony tied Trump directly to the quid pro quo.
The Ukraine report, however, gets around this fact by pointing to key statements not as a part of the inquiry itself, but made in public by White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Trump himself.
During the House Intelligence Committee’s recent impeachment hearings, Rep. Devin Nunes of California was among President Donald Trump’s most vociferous and combative defenders. The Intelligence Committee’s lengthy, comprehensive impeachment report, released on Tuesday, shows that Nunes was hardly an impartial observer — and the famous criminal defense attorney Joseph A. Bondy, who is representing indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, asserted the GOP congressman had no business participating in the hearings.
The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security on Wednesday called for an investigation into a $400 million border wall contract awarded this week to North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, a company President Trump personally urged military officials to hire.