The Impeachment Report Read online

  Jamitress Bowden

  Olivia Letts, Intern

  Kristen Charley, Intern

  Anna Rose Marx, Intern

  Kenyatta Collins

  Courtney Miller

  James Darlson, Intern

  Noah Steimel, Intern

  Emma Dulaney

  Travis Stoller, Intern

  Evan Elizabeth Freeman, Intern

  Amy Stratton

  Christophe Godshall, Intern

  Laura Trevisani, Intern

  Brandon Jacobs

  Joshua Zucker

  Elisa LaNier

  House Committee on Foreign Affairs

  Rep. Eliot L. Engel (NY), Chairman

  Rep. Brad Sherman (CA)

  Rep. Michael McCaul (TX) Ranking Member

  Rep. Gregory Meeks (NY)

  Rep. Christopher Smith (NJ)

  Rep. Albio Sires (NJ)

  Rep. Steve Chabot (OH)

  Rep. Gerald Connolly (VA)

  Rep. Joe Wilson (SC)

  Rep. Theodore Deutch (FL)

  Rep. Scott Perry (PA)

  Rep. Karen Bass (CA)

  Rep. Ted Yoho (FL)

  Rep. William Keating (MA)

  Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL)

  Rep. David Cicilline (RI)

  Rep. Lee Zeldin (NY)

  Rep. Ami Bera (CA)

  Rep. James Sensenbrenner (WI)

  Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX)

  Rep. Ann Wagner (MO)

  Rep. Dina Titus (NV)

  Rep. Brian Mast (FL)

  Rep. Adriano Espaillat (NY)

  Rep. Francis Rooney (FL)

  Rep. Ted Lieu (CA)

  Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)

  Rep. Susan Wild (PA)

  Rep. John Curtis (UT)

  Rep. Dean Phillips (MN)

  Rep. Ken Buck (CO)

  Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN)

  Rep. Ron Wright (TX)

  Rep. Colin Allred (TX)

  Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (PA)

  Rep. Andy Levin (MI)

  Rep. Tim Burchett (TN)

  Rep. Abigail Spanberger (VA)

  Rep. Greg Pence (IN)

  Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA)

  Rep. Steve Watkins (KS)

  Rep. Tom Malinowski (NJ)

  Rep. Michael Guest (MS)

  Rep. David Trone (MD)

  Rep. Jim Costa (CA)

  Rep. Juan Vargas (CA)

  Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (CA)

  Majority Staff

  Jason Steinbaum, Staff Director

  Doug Campbell, Deputy Staff Director

  Laura Carey, Senior Professional Staff Member, State Department Oversight

  Tim Mulvey, Communications Director

  Jacqueline Ramos, Senior Professional Staff Member, Europe and Russia

  Operations and Press Staff

  Evan Bursey

  Rachel Levitan

  Jacqueline Colvett

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  KEY FINDINGS OF FACT

  SECTION I. THE PRESIDENT’S MISCONDUCT

  1. The President Forced Out the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine

  2. The President Put Giuliani and the Three Amigos in Charge of Ukraine Issues

  3. The President Froze Military Assistance to Ukraine

  4. The President’s Meeting with the Ukrainian President Was Conditioned on An Announcement of Investigations

  5. The President Asked the Ukrainian President to Interfere in the 2020 U.S. Election by Investigating the Bidens and 2016 Election Interference

  6. The President Wanted Ukraine to Announce the Investigations Publicly

  7. The President’s Conditioning of Military Assistance and a White House Meeting on Announcement of Investigations Raised Alarm

  8. The President’s Scheme Was Exposed

  SECTION II. THE PRESIDENT’S OBSTRUCTION OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES’ IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY

  1. Constitutional Authority for Congressional Oversight and Impeachment

  2. The President’s Categorical Refusal to Comply

  3. The President’s Refusal to Produce Any and All Subpoenaed Documents

  4. The President’s Refusal to Allow Top Aides to Testify

  5. The President’s Unsuccessful Attempts to Block Key Witnesses

  6. The President’s Intimidation of Witnesses

  APPENDIX A: KEY PEOPLE AND ENTITIES

  APPENDIX B: ABBREVIATIONS AND COMMON TERMS

  PREFACE

  This report reflects the evidence gathered thus far by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in coordination with the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, as part of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

  The report is the culmination of an investigation that began in September 2019 and intensified over the past three months as new revelations and evidence of the President’s misconduct towards Ukraine emerged. The Committees pursued the truth vigorously, but fairly, ensuring the full participation of both parties throughout the probe.

  Sustained by the tireless work of more than three dozen dedicated staff across the three Committees, we issued dozens of subpoenas for documents and testimony and took more than 100 hours of deposition testimony from 17 witnesses. To provide the American people the opportunity to learn and evaluate the facts themselves, the Intelligence Committee held seven public hearings with 12 witnesses—including three requested by the Republican Minority—that totaled more than 30 hours.

  At the outset, I want to recognize my late friend and colleague Elijah E. Cummings, whose grace and commitment to justice served as our North Star throughout this investigation. I would also like to thank my colleagues Eliot L. Engel and Carolyn B. Maloney, chairs respectively of the Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform Committees, as well as the Members of those Committees, many of whom provided invaluable contributions. Members of the Intelligence Committee, as well, worked selflessly and collaboratively throughout this investigation. Finally, I am grateful to Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the trust she placed in our Committees to conduct this work and for her wise counsel throughout.

  I also want to thank the dedicated professional staff of the Intelligence Committee, who worked ceaselessly and with remarkable poise and ability. My deepest gratitude goes to Daniel Goldman, Rheanne Wirkkala, Maher Bitar, Timothy Bergreen, Patrick Boland, Daniel Noble, Nicolas Mitchell, Sean Misko, Patrick Fallon, Diana Pilipenko, William Evans, Ariana Rowberry, Wells Bennett, and William Wu. Additional Intelligence Committee staff members also assured that the important oversight work of the Committee continued, even as we were required to take on the additional responsibility of conducting a key part of the House impeachment inquiry. Finally, I would
like to thank the devoted and outstanding staff of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, including but not limited to Dave Rapallo, Susanne Sachsman Grooms, Peter Kenny, Krista Boyd, and Janet Kim, as well as Laura Carey from the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

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  In his farewell address, President George Washington warned of a moment when “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

  The Framers of the Constitution well understood that an individual could one day occupy the Office of the President who would place his personal or political interests above those of the nation. Having just won hard-fought independence from a King with unbridled authority, they were attuned to the dangers of an executive who lacked fealty to the law and the Constitution.

  In response, the Framers adopted a tool used by the British Parliament for several hundred years to constrain the Crown—the power of impeachment. Unlike in Britain, where impeachment was typically reserved for inferior officers but not the King himself, impeachment in our untested democracy was specifically intended to serve as the ultimate form of accountability for a duly-elected President. Rather than a mechanism to overturn an election, impeachment was explicitly contemplated as a remedy of last resort for a president who fails to faithfully execute his oath of office “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  Accordingly, the Constitution confers the power to impeach the president on Congress, stating that the president shall be removed from office upon conviction for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While the Constitutional standard for removal from office is justly a high one, it is nonetheless an essential check and balance on the authority of the occupant of the Office of the President, particularly when that occupant represents a continuing threat to our fundamental democratic norms, values, and laws.

  Alexander Hamilton explained that impeachment was not designed to cover only criminal violations, but also crimes against the American people. “The subjects of its jurisdiction,” Hamilton wrote, “are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

  Similarly, future Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court James Wilson, a delegate from Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, distinguished impeachable offenses from those that reside “within the sphere of ordinary jurisprudence.” As he noted, “impeachments are confined to political characters, to political crimes and misdemeanors, and to political punishments.”

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  As this report details, the impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. In furtherance of this scheme, President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, of politically-motivated investigations, including one into President Trump’s domestic political opponent. In pressuring President Zelensky to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian President, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine.

  The President engaged in this course of conduct for the benefit of his own presidential reelection, to harm the election prospects of a political rival, and to influence our nation’s upcoming presidential election to his advantage. In doing so, the President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.

  At the center of this investigation is the memorandum prepared following President Trump’s July 25, 2019, phone call with Ukraine’s President, which the White House declassified and released under significant public pressure. The call record alone is stark evidence of misconduct; a demonstration of the President’s prioritization of his personal political benefit over the national interest. In response to President Zelensky’s appreciation for vital U.S. military assistance, which President Trump froze without explanation, President Trump asked for “a favor though”: two specific investigations designed to assist his reelection efforts.

  Our investigation determined that this telephone call was neither the start nor the end of President Trump’s efforts to bend U.S. foreign policy for his personal gain. Rather, it was a dramatic crescendo within a months-long campaign driven by President Trump in which senior U.S. officials, including the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Acting Chief of Staff, the Secretary of Energy, and others were either knowledgeable of or active participants in an effort to extract from a foreign nation the personal political benefits sought by the President.

  The investigation revealed the nature and extent of the President’s misconduct, notwithstanding an unprecedented campaign of obstruction by the President and his Administration to prevent the Committees from obtaining documentary evidence and testimony. A dozen witnesses followed President Trump’s orders, defying voluntary requests and lawful subpoenas, and refusing to testify. The White House, Department of State, Department of Defense, Office of Management and Budget, and Department of Energy refused to produce a single document in response to our subpoenas.

  Ultimately, this sweeping effort to stonewall the House of Representatives’ “sole Power of Impeachment” under the Constitution failed because witnesses courageously came forward and testified in response to lawful process. The report that follows was only possible because of their sense of duty and devotion to their country and its Constitution.

  Nevertheless, there remain unanswered questions, and our investigation must continue, even as we transmit our report to the Judiciary Committee. Given the proximate threat of further presidential attempts to solicit foreign interference in our next election, we cannot wait to make a referral until our efforts to obtain additional testimony and documents wind their way through the courts. The evidence of the President’s misconduct is overwhelming, and so too is the evidence of his obstruction of Congress. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a stronger or more complete case of obstruction than that demonstrated by the President since the inquiry began.

  The damage the President has done to our relationship with a key strategic partner will be remedied over time, and Ukraine continues to enjoy strong bipartisan support in Congress. But the damage to our system of checks and balances, and to the balance of power within our three branches of government, will be long-lasting and potentially irrevocable if the President’s ability to stonewall Congress goes unchecked. Any future President will feel empowered to resist an investigation into their own wrongdoing, malfeasance, or corruption, and the result will be a nation at far greater risk of all three.

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  The decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry is not one we took lightly. Under the best of circumstances, impeachment is a wrenching process for the nation. I resisted calls to undertake an impeachment investigation for many months on that basis, notwithstanding the existence of presidential misconduct that I believed to be deeply unethical and damaging to our democracy. The alarming events and actions detailed in this report, however, left us with no choice but to proceed.

  In making the decision to move forward, we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president. Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the bene
fit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the President welcomed and utilized.

  Having witnessed the degree to which interference by a foreign power in 2016 harmed our democracy, President Trump cannot credibly claim ignorance to its pernicious effects. Even more pointedly, the President’s July call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, in which he solicited an investigation to damage his most feared 2020 opponent, came the day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified to Congress about Russia’s efforts to damage his 2016 opponent and his urgent warning of the dangers of further foreign interference in the next election. With this backdrop, the solicitation of new foreign intervention was the act of a president unbound, not one chastened by experience. It was the act of a president who viewed himself as unaccountable and determined to use his vast official powers to secure his reelection.

  This repeated and pervasive threat to our democratic electoral process added urgency to our work. On October 3, 2019, even as our Committee was engaged in this inquiry, President Trump publicly declared anew that other countries should open investigations into his chief political rival, saying, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” and that “President Zelensky, if it were me, I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.” When a reporter asked the President what he hoped Ukraine’s President would do following the July 25 call, President Trump, seeking to dispel any doubt as to his continuing intention, responded: “Well, I would think that, if they were honest about it, they’d start a major investigation into the Bidens. It’s a very simple answer.”