House Democrats plan to wrap their two-and-a-half year quest to impeach President Trump in a big Russian bow.
For weeks, Democrats have held closed-door and public hearings about the president’s efforts to get Ukrainian government officials to investigate corruption and election interference allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
But they have not forgotten Russia, which was the centerpiece of an impeachment effort that practically began when Trump entered the White House in 2017.
While a two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to produce evidence Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians, Democrats have resuscitated the allegations to impeach him.
“This isn’t about Ukraine,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after announcing on Dec. 5 that Democrats will draft impeachment articles. “This is about Russia.”
Pelosi’s declaration comes after Democrats had all but abandoned a Trump-Russia impeachment effort following the release of the April 2019 findings of the Mueller report.
While Republicans said the report cleared the Trump campaign of directly coordinating with the Russians in 2016, Democrats seized on Mueller’s determination that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Democrats toyed with the idea of going after Trump for the 10 possible instances of obstruction in the Mueller report, but the effort began losing steam last summer and was abandoned entirely once the news media reported on an anonymous whistleblower complaint about Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Democrats quickly dropped Russia and shifted their entire effort to Trump’s decision to block Ukraine from getting $391 million in security aid, which they said was meant to coerce Zelensky into a public pledge to investigate Biden and the Democrats.
But Pelosi didn’t mention Zelensky the day she announced the House would draft articles to impeach the president.
“All roads lead to Putin,” she told reporters. “Understand that.” Pelosi said the evidence Democrats produced after weeks of depositions and hearings about Ukraine reveals Trump’s allegiance to Russia, who she said is again colluding with the president to undermine a U.S. election, just like in 2016.
Ukraine, Pelosi said, was denied critical security aid desperately needed to fend off Russian aggression.
“Who benefits by our withholding that military assistance?” Pelosi said last week. “Russia. It’s about Russia. Russia is invading Eastern Ukraine.”
The House Judiciary Committee hasn’t made public which articles they’ll draft. Democrats have suggested they’ll vote to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, among other articles.
Pelosi declined to say whether impeachment articles will include the House investigation into Russian collusion but said Democrats “are comfortable with all the time that has gone into this, the two-and-a-half years since the appointment of Mueller and all that.”
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said Russian collusion is a flimsy allegation on which to base impeaching Trump. The president has irked Russia by providing three installments of security aid to Ukraine, including the $391 million that was eventually released to the Ukrainian government after a 55-day delay.
“This is a real reach on the part of Pelosi,” Carpenter said. “If you look at the substance of his policies regarding Ukraine and Russia, they are surprisingly hard line. The notion of Trump doing Russia’s bidding is just without substance. It’s a fantasy.”
