The Impeachment Report Read online

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  INTRODUCTION

  JON MEACHAM

  The weather was hot, the stakes high, the debates fraught. In the long Philadelphia summer of 1787, in the stuffy confines of the Pennsylvania State House (later known as Independence Hall), the members of the Constitutional Convention were framing a new government for the nascent United States of America. In conversations about executive power, James Madison of Virginia spoke of the presidency as a unique office that would ideally transcend sectional jealousies. In a speech on Saturday, July 21, Madison argued, “The Executive Magistrate would be considered as a national officer, acting for and equally sympathizing with every part of the U. States.”

  From an executive to whom much was given, though, much would be expected, for Madison and his colleagues in Philadelphia shared a tempered, often pessimistic view of human nature. “If men were angels,” Madison was to write in The Federalist, “no government would be necessary.”

  And since men were decidedly unangelic, government would require divisions of sovereignty and detailed sanctions to keep things in balance. Hence an entire constitutional structure was created, one that has served the nation well for nearly two and a half centuries.

  Impeachment and removal from office were the ultimate check on presidential power. “Shall any man be above justice?” George Mason asked at the convention. “Above all, shall that man be above it who can commit the most extensive injustice?”

  For the Founders, the answer was no. As the report that follows shows, it is an issue that confronts us even now. The presidency of Donald Trump has challenged or upended innumerable American conventions; in this season, the country is facing a reckoning. Given the story told by the House Intelligence Committee in this document, do Americans believe that such conduct by a president is acceptable? That is the question that lies before the Congress—and before the nation.

  A bit more history. In 1776, in Common Sense, Thomas Paine used the term “President” to describe a chief magistrate. Scholars believe that Paine was the first to use this term for a head of an American government. Even then, more than a decade before the Constitutional Convention, reservations were expressed about investing too much power in a single man. “But where, say some, is the king of America?” Paine wrote. “I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain….[I]n America the law is king.” Paine went on to write, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

  The potential power of the presidency, for good or for ill, was always clear. “His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people,” John Adams wrote in 1790. To Alexander Hamilton, writing in The Federalist, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to…the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”

  By 1810, after eight years in the office himself, Thomas Jefferson would write, “In a government like ours it is the duty of the Chief-magistrate, in order to enable himself to do all the good which his station requires, to endeavor, by all honorable means, to unite in himself the confidence of the whole people. This alone, in any case where the energy of the nation is required, can produce a union of the powers of the whole, and point them in a single direction, as if all constituted but one body & one mind: and this alone can render a weaker nation unconquerable by a stronger one.”

  But how to create this “union of the powers of the whole” while maintaining a balance among the branches of government? It was this balance that Madison believed essential to safeguarding liberty from overreaching legislators or from grasping presidents, and it remains a perennial and consuming issue.

  To Madison, foreign interference in elections was a threat from the beginning. It would be, he warned, “an object of great moment with the great rival powers of Europe…to have at the head of our government a man attached to their respective policies & interests.” And what about once the president was in office? The power to impeach was crucial.

  “Mr. Madison thought it indispensable,” he wrote in a third-person entry in his Constitutional Convention notes, “that some provision should be made for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the chief magistrate.” Madison’s fears? A president “might betray his trust to foreign powers….[L]oss of capacity or corruption was…within the compass of probable events, and either of them might be fatal to the Republic.” The convention settled on impeachment by the House with conviction in the Senate—an instance of Madisonian checks and balances.

  In our time we are living in a moment marked by demagoguery, reflexive partisanship, and a Hobbesian world of constant and total political warfare. We know all the factors: the return of the kind of partisan media that shaped us in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, relentless gerrymandering of election districts that has produced few swing congressional seats, and the allure of reality-TV programming that has blurred lines between entertainment and governance.

  So what to do? We can begin by reading the following report. In so doing we will find ourselves at once oriented and informed. “When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea,” Daniel Webster said in 1830, “he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.” The fate of this presidency, of the ensuing future elections, and of our true course, lies in two sets of hands. The first is the House and the Senate. The second is the electorate that will determine the outcome of the 2020 campaign. People of good will can disagree about impeachment, but one hopes that we can at least agree on what happened even if some choose to excuse it or dismiss it.

  Divisions of opinion are inherent elements in a democracy. There was never a once-upon-a-time in American life, and there will never be a happily-ever-after. The world doesn’t work that way. Andrew Johnson survived impeachment; Richard Nixon’s support held until the very last moment of Watergate; Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist reign lasted not a season or a single cycle but four long years—and even after he’d fallen into disgrace, 34 percent of the country still supported him.

  Yet the free flow of information and a respect for facts over opinion, for reason over tribe, are critical to the life of the Republic. As Theodore Roosevelt remarked, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” Even with their manifold failings, lawmakers and journalists who seek to report and to illuminate rather than to opine and to divide are essential. “Publicity is the very soul of justice,” the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote. “It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity….Without publicity, all other checks are fruitless: in comparison with publicity, all other checks are of small account.”

  Which, more than a cent
ury and a half later, President John F. Kennedy understood. “I think [the press] is invaluable, even though…it is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news,” Kennedy told a group of network interviewers in December 1962. “But I would say that it is an invaluable arm of the Presidency, as a check really on what is going on in the administration, and more things come to my attention that cause me concern or give me information….[T]here is a terrific disadvantage to not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily….Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.”

  To say nothing of a very, very active legislature, which is currently at work exercising its constitutional obligation to check and balance the executive. Politicians tend to mirror rather than mold the public, however, which means the nation at large is also on trial.

  The past and the present tell us that demagogues can thrive only when a substantial portion of the demos—the people—wants them to. In his nineteenth-century classic The American Commonwealth, the English scholar and statesman Lord Bryce warned of the dangers of a renegade president. His view, however, was not that the individual himself, from the White House, could overthrow the Constitution. Rather, Bryce believed, disaster would come at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base. “A bold President who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country, might be tempted to override the law, and deprive the minority of the protection which the law affords it,” Bryce wrote. “He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.”

  The cheering news is that hope is not lost. “The people have often made mistakes,” Harry Truman once said, “but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections.”

  Here, in this volume, are the facts—and as John Adams remarked, facts are stubborn things. Reflecting on the Constitutional Convention, Madison recalled, “There never was an assembly of men, charged with a great & arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them, than were the members of the Federal Convention of 1787.” What history will say about how this Congress and this generation discharge their own “great & arduous trust” in the wake of this report is an open—and urgent—question.

  THE TRUMP-UKRAINE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY REPORT

  Report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pursuant to H. Res. 660 in Consultation with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs

  December 2019

  House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

  Rep. Adam B. Schiff (CA), Chairman

  Rep. Jim Himes (CT)

  Rep. Devin Nunes (CA), Ranking Member

  Rep. Terri Sewell (AL)

  Rep. Mike Conaway (TX)

  Rep. André Carson (IN)

  Rep. Michael Turner (OH)

  Rep. Jackie Speier (CA)

  Rep. Brad Wenstrup (OH)

  Rep. Mike Quigley (IL)

  Rep. Chris Stewart (UT)

  Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA)

  Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY)

  Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX)

  Rep. Will Hurd (TX)

  Rep. Denny Heck (WA)

  Rep. John Ratcliffe (TX)

  Rep. Peter Welch (VT)

  Rep. Jim Jordan (OH)

  Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (NY)

  Rep. Val Demings (FL)

  Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL)

  Majority Staff

  Timothy S. Bergreen, Staff Director

  Daniel S. Goldman, Director of Investigations

  Maher Bitar, General Counsel

  Rheanne Wirkkala, Deputy Director of Investigations

  Patrick M. Boland, Communications Director

  Impeachment Inquiry Investigative Staff

  William M. Evans

  Daniel S. Noble

  Patrick Fallon

  Diana Y. Pilipenko

  Sean A. Misko

  Ariana N. Rowberry

  Nicolas A. Mitchell

  Carly A. Blake, Deputy Staff Director

  William Wu, Budget and Policy Director

  Wells C. Bennett, Deputy General Counsel

  Oversight Staff

  WLinda D. Cohen

  Lucian D. Sikorskyj

  Thomas Eager

  Conrad Stosz

  Abigail C. Grace

  Kathy L. Suber

  Kelsey M. Lax

  Aaron A. Thurman

  Amanda A. Rogers Thorpe

  Raffaela L. Wakeman

  Non-Partisan Security and Information Technology Staff

  Kristin Jepson

  Kimberlee Kerr

  Claudio Grajeda

  House Committee on Oversight and Reform

  Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (NY), Chairwoman

  Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (MD), Chairman

  Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC)

  Rep. Jim Jordan (OH), Ranking Member

  Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (MO)

  Rep. Paul Gosar (AZ)

  Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA)

  Rep. Thomas Massie (KY)

  Rep. Jim Cooper (TN)

  Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC)

  Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (VA)

  Rep. Mark Meadows (NC)

  Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL)

  Rep. Jody Hice (GA)

  Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD)

  Rep. Glenn Grothman (WI)

  Rep. Harley Rouda (CA)

  Rep. James Comer (KY)

  Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL)

  Rep. Michael Cloud (TX)

  Rep. John Sarbanes (MD)

  Rep. Bob Gibbs (OH)

  Rep. Peter Welch (VT)

  Rep. Clay Higgins (LA)

  Rep. Jackie Speier (CA)

  Rep. Ralph Norman (SC)

  Rep. Robin Kelly (IL)

  Rep. Chip Roy (TX)

  Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (CA)

  Rep. Carol Miller (WV)

  Rep. Brenda Lawrence (IL)

  Rep. Mark Green (TN)

  Rep. Stacey Plaskett (VI)

  Rep. Kelly Armstrong (ND)

  Rep. Ro Khanna (CA)

  Rep. Greg Steube (FL)

  Rep. Jimmy Gomez (CA)

  Rep. Fred Keller (PA)

  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY)

  Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA)

  Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI)

  Majority Staff

  Dave Rapallo, Staff Dir
ector

  Susanne Sachsman Grooms, Deputy Staff Director & Chief Counsel

  Peter Kenny, Chief Investigative Counsel

  Krista A. Boyd, General Counsel

  Janet H. Kim, Chief Counsel for Investigations

  Russell Anello, Chief Oversight Counsel

  Aryele Bradford, Communications Director

  Investigative Staff

  S. Tori Anderson

  Gina Kim

  Aaron D. Blacksberg

  Jason Powell

  Chioma Chukwu

  Dan Rebnord

  Cassie Fields

  Ricardo Brandon Rios

  Greta Gao

  Erinn L. Sauer, Detailee

  Michael Gordon

  Amish A. Shah

  Jessica L. Heller

  Laura Waters

  Operations and Press Team

  Zachary Barger, Intern

  Kellie Larkin