Ahead of a US House panel vote on a report of its findings based on recent hearings in an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, its Republican members issued a 110-page prebuttal Monday clearing the president of any wrongdoing in his dealings with Ukraine.
But news reports indicated Democrats are considering expanding the grounds for impeachment beyond Ukraine. Those pushing for it have pointed to the instances of obstruction of justice cited by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller in his report on Russian interference in the 2020 elections.
For now, though, Democrats are staying with Ukraine. The House intelligence committee will vote later Tuesday to advance its findings, based on the closed-door and public hearings it held over the past weeks, to to the House judiciary committee to determine the article of impeachment. It is scheduled to hold its first hearing on Wednesday, in which the Trump administration has said it will not be participating.
But the president’s Republican allies will be present. And their arguments are unlikely to be any different from the case they laid out in the prebuttal, which concluded, in sum, that evidence presented before the committee “shows no quid pro quo, bribery, extortion, or abuse of power”.
The report argued that the president’s reluctance to meet with Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky and allow the nearly $400 million in security aid to to go through was not intended to coerce Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals, as had been alleged by Democrats.
Rather, it was Trump’s “deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption” and his “long-held skepticism of US foreign assistance”. And that his concerns about role played in a Ukrainian energy company by Hunter Biden, the former vice-president Joe Biden’s son, were “valid”.
Trump is alleged to have withheld a White House meeting with Zelensky and the security aid to force Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and the Democratic National Committee. At the heart of these allegation is a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, which led the launch of the impeach inquiry.
