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Shifting Course, Democrats Plan First Floor Vote on Impeachment Inquiry Democrats Move Toward Bringing Impeachment Inquiry Public
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The House plans to take its first formal vote Thursday on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, Democratic leaders said Monday, ushering in a new phase as they prepare to go public with their investigation into his dealings with Ukraine. WASHINGTON — House Democrats moved quickly on Monday to bring their impeachment case against President Trump into the open, saying they would forgo court battles with recalcitrant witnesses and would vote this week on procedures to govern nationally televised hearings.
Democrats described the vote, which will come more than a month after they launched the inquiry, as a necessary next step to lay out the rules for conducting it in public, rather than a response to accusations from Republicans and the White House that the process has violated precedents and denied the president due process rights. Representative Adam B. Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman leading the inquiry, began the day by telling reporters that Democrats would not wait to fight the Trump administration in court as it moves to block key witness testimony. Instead, he warned that White House directives not to cooperate — like one that stopped Mr. Trump’s former deputy national security adviser from appearing Monday morning — would simply bolster their case that the president had abused his office and obstructed Congress’s investigation.
It marks a shift for Democrats, who have resisted for weeks the idea of holding a vote on the impeachment inquiry, arguing that doing so was unnecessary to authorize their work, and privately worrying that doing so could put politically vulnerable Democrats in a difficult position. By the afternoon, Speaker Nancy Pelosi added to that sense of momentum. She announced that after weeks of private fact finding, the full House would vote on Thursday to initiate a new, public phase of the inquiry by establishing rules for the public presentation of evidence and outlining due process rights for Mr. Trump. It will be the first time all House lawmakers will be asked to go on record on the investigation since it began in September, something Democrats had so far resisted.
But in scheduling the vote, Democrats were effectively challenging Mr. Trump and his congressional allies who have called the inquiry an unfair sham of a process but avoided any substantive discussion of the president’s conduct. Whether they can pick up the votes of moderate Republicans remains to be seen. “We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas or continue obstructing the House of Representatives,” Ms. Pelosi said of the vote in a letter to colleagues. “Nobody is above the law.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the vote in a letter to colleagues Monday afternoon. Together, the announcements sent the clearest signals to date that Democrats believe their month-old inquiry into Mr. Trump’s attempts to pressure a foreign nation to investigate his political rivals is on track to collect enough evidence to begin making an effective impeachment case before the nation by Thanksgiving. And they indicated a growing sense of urgency among party leaders who worry that their proceeding could lose momentum and bleed into next year without a vote on articles of impeachment.
“This resolution establishes the procedure for hearings that are open to the American people, authorizes the disclosure of deposition transcripts, outlines procedures to transfer evidence to the Judiciary Committee as it considers potential articles of impeachment, and sets forth due process rights for the president and his counsel,” Ms. Pelosi said in her letter. In earlier oversight disputes, House Democrats have turned to the courts with some frequency. But those lawsuits have eaten up valuable months without signs of resolution any time soon — time that impeachment investigators do not have.
The rules will also allow for staff aides of the House Intelligence Committee to question witnesses directly during public hearings, according to an official working on the inquiry who described the measure on condition of anonymity because it had yet to be made public. It was not immediately clear if the two other panels contributing the inquiry, the Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform committees, would also convene public hearings.
So far, the impeachment inquiry has played out almost entirely behind the closed doors of the Intelligence panel, where Republican and Democratic staff and lawmakers have questioned a string of witnesses. But Democrats leading it had long forecast that they would begin to move some witness testimony and a presentation of facts gathered in private into public view.
Lawmakers and aides for several committees were still drafting the resolution Monday afternoon, and declined to share many further details. Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Rules Committee, said he would introduce the resolution on Tuesday. His panel plans to consider it on Wednesday, followed by a vote of the full House on Thursday.
Democrats have argued for weeks that they did not need a formal vote of the full House to do so, and late last week, a Federal District Court judge agreed with them. They repeated those arguments on Monday, framing the vote as an extra precautionary step.
“We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives,” Ms. Pelosi wrote.
Republicans signaled they would oppose the measure en masse. Shortly after the vote was announced, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, said Democrats called the announcement “an admission that this process has been botched from the start,” and said Republicans “will not legitimize” it.
In another shift in strategy, House Democrats will forgo using the federal courts to try to compel testimony from recalcitrant witnesses in their impeachment inquiry, and warned that lawmakers would instead use the lack of cooperation to bolster their case that President Trump has abused his office and obstructed Congress’s investigation.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed plan after Charles M. Kupperman, the former deputy national security adviser and one of Mr. Trump’s “closest confidential” advisers, defied a House subpoena for testimony that had been scheduled for Monday morning.
The White House on Friday said that Mr. Kupperman was absolutely immune from testifying and directed him not to appear in defiance of a subpoena. That prompted the former official to file a lawsuit against Mr. Trump and congressional Democrats asking a federal judge whether he could testify, raising the prospect of a drawn-out legal battle over weighty questions about the separation of powers that could effectively stall the impeachment inquiry for months.
“We are not willing to let the White House engage us in a lengthy game of rope-a-dope in the courts, so we press ahead,” Mr. Schiff told reporters outside his secure hearing rooms.“We are not willing to let the White House engage us in a lengthy game of rope-a-dope in the courts, so we press ahead,” Mr. Schiff told reporters outside his secure hearing rooms.
In earlier oversight disputes, House Democrats have turned to the courts with some frequency, but those lawsuits have already eaten up valuable months of time without signs of resolution any time soon. Mr. Schiff indicated Democrats now did not have the luxury of waiting, given the gravity of the allegations that Mr. Trump abused his power to enlist help from Ukraine in smearing his political opponents. Democrats have resisted for weeks the idea of holding a vote on the impeachment inquiry, arguing that doing so was unnecessary to authorize their work, and privately worrying that a floor vote could put politically vulnerable Democrats in a difficult position.
But they have come under intense criticism from Republicans for failing to seek formal authorization for the inquiry, a step that is not required by the Constitution or House rules. In scheduling a vote now, Democrats were effectively challenging Mr. Trump and his congressional allies who have called the inquiry an unfair sham of a process, but avoided any substantive discussion of the president’s conduct.
Still, Republicans signaled that after weeks of calling for a vote on the inquiry, they would oppose the resolution en masse.
“We will not legitimize the Schiff/Pelosi sham impeachment,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, said in a tweet.
Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said Ms. Pelosi was “finally admitting what the rest of America already knew — that Democrats were conducting an unauthorized impeachment proceeding, refusing to give the president due process, and their secret, shady, closed door depositions are completely and irreversibly illegitimate.”
Democrats said their inquiry has been proper from the start. Ms. Pelosi reiterated what Democrats have argued for weeks and a Federal District Court judge ruled last week: that they did not need a formal vote of the full House to start a legitimate inquiry. (The Justice Department separately announced Monday it would appeal the ruling handed down Friday.)
So far, the work of the impeachment inquiry has mostly been done out of public view, with staff for Democrats and Republicans questioning a growing roster of diplomats and other administration officials in the closed chambers of the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats are pleased with the portrait they have assembled of a president who bypassed the normal channels of diplomacy to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and unproven theories that could exonerate Russia from aiding his campaign in 2016 and instead implicate Democrats in interfering in the election.
That work was briefly interrupted on Monday, when Charles M. Kupperman, the former deputy national security adviser, defied a House subpoena for testimony, drawing Mr. Schiff’s ire. The White House said on Friday that Mr. Kupperman, as one of the president’s “closest confidential” advisers, was immune from testifying, and directed him not to appear in defiance of a subpoena. That prompted the former official to file a lawsuit against Mr. Trump and congressional Democrats asking a federal judge whether he could testify, raising the prospect of a drawn-out legal battle over weighty questions about the separation of powers that could effectively stall the impeachment inquiry for months.
Mr. Schiff conceded that the White House would most likely try to invoke similar privilege to try to block other crucial witnesses, including John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser said to be alarmed by Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Doing so would only fuel another article of impeachment charging Mr. Trump with obstructing Congress’s fact-finding, he said.
“If this witness had something to say that would be helpful to the White House, they would want him to come and testify,” Mr. Schiff said. “They plainly don’t.”“If this witness had something to say that would be helpful to the White House, they would want him to come and testify,” Mr. Schiff said. “They plainly don’t.”
Mr. Schiff acknowledged that the White House would most likely try to invoke similar privilege to try to block other high-level witnesses, including John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser said to be alarmed by Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Doing so would only fuel another article of impeachment charging Mr. Trump with obstructing Congress’s fact-finding, he said. As many as five more officials are expected to testify in closed session this week, including Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, who is scheduled to appear on Tuesday and plans to detail his concerns about Mr. Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
The remarks came as impeachment investigators braced for a busy week, which will include testimony from another five or more witnesses. But if they are going to convince the public — and potentially some Republicans — that Mr. Trump’s behavior warrants making him only the third president in American history to be impeached, they know they will have to secure clear and damning testimony out in the open, before rolling television cameras, where the facts are not filtered through the news media and selectively leaked.
Around the time Mr. Schiff was speaking, the Justice Department announced that it would appeal a Federal District Court ruling handed down on Friday that said the House’s effort was a legally legitimate impeachment inquiry, and ordered the executive branch to provide secret grand-jury evidence to the House Judiciary Committee collected by the former special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. Democrats described the vote as a necessary step to do just that.
The Trump legal team has argued that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate because the full House has not voted to formally authorize one. The ruling by Chief Judge Beryl Howell undercut a key argument the White House has invoked to justify its orders to executive branch officials to defy congressional subpoenas about the Ukraine affair. “This resolution establishes the procedure for hearings that are open to the American people, authorizes the disclosure of deposition transcripts, outlines procedures to transfer evidence to the Judiciary Committee as it considers potential articles of impeachment, and sets forth due process rights for the president and his counsel,” Ms. Pelosi said in her letter.
Judge Howell had ordered the department to turn over the grand-jury evidence by Wednesday. In notifying the court that it would appeal the order to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the administration asked Judge Howell to suspend that deadline while the higher court weighs the issues. Though aides for several committees were still drafting the resolution Monday evening, the rough outlines of the next phase of the inquiry began to come into view.
Mr. Kupperman’s lawyer cited questions about the legal legitimacy of the inquiry in a lawsuit he filed on Friday after receiving the House subpoena and a White House directive for him to violate it. The suit, which was highly unusual, asked a federal judge to determine which order Mr. Kupperman should comply with. It is unclear whether a judge will consider the case. After it wraps up its closed witness depositions in the coming weeks, the House Intelligence Committee will begin to hold public hearings with key witnesses, such as Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union; Fiona Hill, a former top White House adviser; and William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine.
If it did, though, legal experts say the case would present a series of thorny questions for the courts about the extent of the president’s powers to shield information from Congress, especially in the context of impeachment. Reaching a final answer could take months or longer to sort out and possibly make it to the Supreme Court — a fact that has most likely shaped Democrats’ reasoning on how to proceed. The rules will allow for the committee’s staff aides to question witnesses directly during public hearings, according to an official working on the inquiry who described the measure on condition of anonymity because it had yet to be made public.
“The claim to absolute immunity is weak, and there are historical examples of close presidential advisers testifying in the context of impeachment investigations, but there’s no way to be confident about whether courts will require disclosure of particular presidential communications with national security aides and foreign officials,” said Martin S. Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Obama administration. When the panel concludes its fact finding, Mr. Schiff will transmit raw evidence and, potentially, a written report on his findings to the House Judiciary Committee, the venue where presidential impeachment articles have traditionally been drafted and debated. In that sense, Mr. Schiff could play a role roughly akin to Ken Starr, the independent counsel who presented the results of his investigation into President Bill Clinton to the committee in 1998 as it weighed impeachment.
House Republicans railed against Democrats on Monday morning, saying that they found Mr. Kupperman’s stance to be a reasonable one in the face of what they said was a sham investigation in search of a crime that did not occur. The Judiciary Committee would then be responsible for convening hearings to consider additional evidence, draft articles of impeachment and vote on whether to recommend them to the full House. It is at that stage when Democrats appear poised to give Mr. Trump and his legal team a chance to offer input on the case. It was not clear Monday evening how far they would go in granting them the right to call or cross-examine witnesses, as lawyers for Mr. Clinton and President Richard M. Nixon were allowed to do in earlier proceedings.
“He’s waiting on the court to rule,” said Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Oversight Committee, adding his own view that the inquiry was a “charade.”
Mr. Schiff, who has significantly scaled back his public remarks in recent weeks, used his comments on Monday to hit back hard at House Republicans, whom he accused of “endorsing the White House obstruction.” He argued they should at least stand up for the legislative branch’s authority to compel evidence from the executive branch, saying that there would be future presidents they may want to investigate.
“What I find harder to understand is why the Republican members of this body in this House don’t want these witnesses to come forward,” Mr. Schiff said. “Where is their duty to this institution? Where is their duty to the Constitution? Where is there respect for the rule of law?”
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.Charlie Savage contributed reporting.