Pelosi Uncorks Impeachment Probe With Few Answers and High Risks
The vote puts pressure on Trump, who now is all but certain to face a vote on articles of impeachment in the coming months.
(Bloomberg) -- Nancy Pelosi has launched a new phase of the impeachment inquiry with no explicit timetable, no defined scope of what to investigate, no guarantee the White House will cooperate and not a single Republican vote -- in many ways taking Congress and the country into the exact politically perilous place she long sought to avoid.
The vote puts pressure on President Donald Trump, who now is all but certain to face a vote on articles of impeachment in the coming months. But the onus also falls on Pelosi to finish what she started, with only the slimmest majority of public support in polls and many nervous Democrats who know voters will hold them to account for what happens.
“Nobody comes to Congress to impeach a president of the United States,” Pelosi said before Thursday’s vote. “We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and that’s what we cannot ignore.”
The starkly partisan investigation is about to burst into the court of public opinion, with just a few weeks to make crucial decisions before Democrats say public hearings may begin. And the calendar is about to turn to the holidays, then to the official starting gun of the Democratic presidential primary in Iowa on Feb. 3.
House Democrats have been careful not to divulge their strategy, but some elements are coming into focus. Republicans criticized closed-door hearings, so they’ll start public ones where witnesses can describe what they saw as improper behavior by Trump related to Ukraine.
They created a mechanism for Trump himself to participate, or a way to blame the White House if he continues to try to block testimony and refuse to turn over documents.
All the while, Pelosi is trying to show that Democrats in Congress aren’t on a single-minded mission to expose Trump, but also are eager to legislate, whether it be on the USMCA trade deal or lowering drug prices.
Political ‘Death March’
Both parties also have an eye on next year’s election, with Trump running for a second term and the Republican Senate majority and Democratic House majority at stake. Republican unity against Thursday’s House vote was a remarkable feat for Trump and GOP vote counters, but not without risk for the moderate Republicans left in the House.
“I think they are on a death march politically into 2020 elections,” said Democratic Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
But many Republicans have already added a defense of Trump’s actions to their ongoing complaints about process.
“Substance will always win out in the end, and this president has nothing to worry about on substance,” Georgia Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said Thursday.
Trump may become the first president to be impeached and then seek re-election. Even if Senate Republicans stick with him and decide not to actually remove him from office, he will still have to face voters who can remove him at the ballot box.
To that end, the president has become deeply engaged in keeping his party in line. Over the past two weeks, Trump has met face-to-face with more than 60 House members, according to an administration official.
After dismissing the need to hire additional staff to counter Democrats’ impeachment efforts, Trump is likely to bring a former Treasury Department spokesman, Tony Sayegh, to the White House to assist with communications related to impeachment, according to people familiar with the matter.
Due Process
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler wouldn’t say Thursday how long the impeachment inquiry will take or whether it could expand beyond the Ukraine issue. He told reporters that, for now, the Intelligence Committee and two other panels will continue to interview witnesses behind closed doors before moving on to public hearings.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has declined to say when those public sessions would begin, or which witnesses would be called to appear.
Nadler said Schiff and his committee are doing “the basic investigation,” similar to that of Independent Counsel Ken Starr prior to the Clinton impeachment, or as the Senate-led Ervin Committee did for the Watergate allegations regarding Richard Nixon.
Once Schiff sends a report to the Judiciary Committee, as outlined in the resolution adopted Thursday, Nadler will also hold hearings with a chance for the president and his lawyers to weigh in. Nadler’s panel would be responsible for drafting articles of impeachment.
Nadler dismissed complaints from Republicans that the first month of private depositions wasn’t open to the president’s lawyers. He said that they will participate when the proceedings move to the Judiciary Committee, when he said it is “proper” for the president to have more recourse.
Pelosi insisted Thursday that Democrats had not decided to vote on articles of impeachment but would see where the investigation leads. But Democrats also have said the evidence on Ukraine alone would likely sustain an impeachment charge, and the process seems aimed toward a vote.
Busy Schedule
At least 10 additional witnesses as of Thursday have been scheduled or invited for the continued closed-door questioning. That list includes former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has not yet agreed to testify.
Four have been scheduled for Monday alone. If they all show, House committees will hear from John Eisenberg, deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs and legal adviser to the National Security Council; Robert Blair, assistant to the president and senior adviser to the acting chief of staff; Michael Ellis, senior associate counsel to the president and deputy legal adviser to the NSC; and Brian McCormack, associate director for natural resources, energy and science at the Office of Management and Budget.
Others are scheduled into the second week of November.
Republicans on the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees are included in these closed hearings and have equal opportunity to question witnesses. Those GOP lawmakers have still complained about the lack of transparency.
They’ve also pointed out how difficult it will be to hear all this testimony and draft articles of impeachment for a floor vote by the end of the year, as Democrats initially suggested they would try to do.
Democrats, meanwhile, are appealing to Republicans’ thoughts for their own legacies when it comes to a final vote on impeachment.
“They really need to be careful because the long view of history will not treat them so well,” Representative Dan Kildee of Michigan, a top Democratic vote counter, said of House Republicans. “This is really a party that has conceded its entire principles in the defense of a single person. That’s really a terrible thing.”
--With assistance from Jordan Fabian and Evan Sully.
To contact the reporters on this story: Steven T. Dennis in Washington at sdennis17@bloomberg.net;Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton, Laurie Asséo
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