Impeachment Briefing: What Happened Today

November 26, 2019 En Sound Media Politics Comments Off on Impeachment Briefing: What Happened Today

This is the Impeachment Briefing, The Times’s newsletter about the impeachment investigation. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weeknight.

  • Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Democrats will deliver a report on President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine “soon” after lawmakers return from Thanksgiving break, handing off the impeachment inquiry to the Judiciary Committee. Read more about what’s next below.

  • A federal judge ruled that the former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify before impeachment investigators about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Mueller investigation. The Justice Department will likely appeal the decision, but it carries broader implications: The White House has blocked witnesses from cooperating in the impeachment inquiry for the same reasons it did Mr. McGahn.

And over the weekend …

  • After Mr. Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president on July 25, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, asked officials in the budget office whether there was a legal justification for withholding military aid, according to newly surfaced emails.

  • A different trove of emails and documents released by the State Department offered new details about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s role in the Ukrainian pressure campaign. He spoke at least twice by telephone with the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in March as Mr. Giuliani was urging Ukraine to investigate Mr. Trump’s rivals.

  • CNN reported that Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor in Vienna in an effort to dig up damaging information on Joe Biden. Mr. Nunes said yesterday that the story was part of a criminal campaign against him by a “corrupt” news media.

House Democrats have concluded — for now, at least — the public hearing portion of the impeachment investigation, ahead of an expected transfer of the case to the House Judiciary Committee. Republicans have their own plans.

  • Impeachment investigators will continue working as they draft a report, which will be released as soon as next week. Mr. Schiff said he could not rule out additional witness depositions or public hearings. But his rough timeline would put the full House on track to vote on impeachment articles by the end of the year.

  • The Judiciary Committee is expected in the coming days to announce public impeachment hearings for next week to hear the evidence and begin drafting and debating impeachment articles. The committee could also hear from expert witnesses to define impeachable offenses and offer Mr. Trump and his legal team a chance to present exculpatory evidence.

  • Staff members for Republicans on the committees conducting the impeachment inquiry will put out a “minority views” report, most likely at the same time Democrats release a report by the majority, my colleague Nick Fandos tells me. That will serve as ammunition for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, offering them arguments for potential hearings.

John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, could still be a font of evidence to House Democrats, but they’re waiting for a court ruling on whether Mr. Bolton can testify. (A hearing will take place on December 10.) I asked my colleague Peter Baker, who has written about Mr. Bolton’s potential role in the inquiry, where we stand.

Peter, what does John Bolton represent for Democrats nearing the end of the fact finding part of the investigation?

If House Democrats’ goal in the public hearings had been to change minds, they don’t have enough evidence. It’s possible no amount of evidence would be enough. If their goal was to hold their caucus and the party line vote, they have enough. So to Democrats, Mr. Bolton is either the holy grail or a huge gamble, to mix metaphors.

Unlike any of the witnesses we saw last week, Mr. Bolton was in the room a lot. He saw the president every day for months. You presume he could shed light in ways no other witnesses could. And Mr. Bolton has teased that. He has held himself out, in effect, as somebody who can provide what nobody else can provide. But there’s a danger. We don’t know what that information is. He’s recently made clear he doesn’t approve of a lot of things in Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he has evidence of impeachable offenses.

We could still see him in a Senate impeachment trial, too, right?

You could easily see a court decision on his testimony at the same time as the Senate is going to trial. At that point, do the Democrats who will prosecute the case in a Senate trial try to call him as a witness? We could even have a ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts, who will preside over the Senate trial, and his ruling could say, yes he owes his testimony, regardless of executive privilege claims.

What happens if he doesn’t testify?

There will be the feeling that Democrats left money on the table, that they didn’t do enough of an investigation to actually get to the bottom of it, that they valued speed over thoroughness. Their argument now is: We’ve got enough here. We don’t need a lot more. And sitting around for months when we’re only months away from an election feels untenable, in their minds.

What happens if he does testify?

We presume he would not be helpful to the president. We know from Fiona Hill and others that he was against this Ukraine pressure campaign. But we don’t know if he would offer evidence against the president himself. Maybe he blames Mr. Giuliani and Gordon Sondland, but not the president.

Can you imagine John Bolton as a potential savior for Democrats?

Democrats have vilified and abhorred him for years. He’s been one of their top boogeymen. To them, he’s the face of the Iraq War. He’s the symbol of the hawkish foreign policy they’ve spent years fighting against. The idea that John Bolton of all people would be the one person Democrats would want and need most is ironic, to say the least.

  • One Ukrainian oligarch was facing federal bribery charges. Another was embroiled in a banking scandal. Both were being pressed to assist in Mr. Giuliani’s hunt for dirt on Mr. Biden.

  • “If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach,” Mr. Trump once tweeted, “I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Our Supreme Court correspondent, Adam Liptak, assessed that vow, and whether the court would entertain his challenge.

  • Our graphics team updated the comprehensive collection of evidence and testimony gathered by impeachment investigators.

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