As the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry reached its close Tuesday, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said President Donald Trump clearly abused the power of the Oval Office during his dealings with Ukraine.
The oversight panel that has spearheaded the monthslong probe into whether Trump attempted to coerce Ukraine leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, into investigating the Biden family, released a report of its findings Tuesday afternoon as it sent it to the House Judiciary Committee — which will begin its own impeachment deliberations Wednesday.
“The level of engagement by the president and his determination to get the investigation into the Bidens he wanted, that’s what is new in this report,” said Welch, who sits on the intelligence committee and spent Tuesday morning reviewing the full report.
Since September the intelligence committee has been investigating a July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, in which the U.S. president asked Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son — Hunter Biden — who served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine, from 2014 to 2019.
Witnesses told lawmakers, in private and then in public, that Trump attempted to use $400 million in military aid and a possible White House meeting as leverage to pressure Zelensky into announcing he was investigating alleged Ukraine involvement in the 2016 presidential election and look into Hunter Biden for corruption and possible conflicts of interest.
Welch has repeatedly said the “smoking gun” in the investigation is the phone call transcript in which Trump asks Zelensky to look into Hunter Biden.
“The hearings have just provided in living color and in elaborate detail just how furious and determined the president’s efforts were to get anyone and everyone to assist him in the Biden investigation,” Welch said Tuesday.
In the report, Democrats on the intelligence panel said Trump used presidential powers to try to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election.
“President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign,” the reports says.
The report also accuses Trump of obstructing the congressional review of his actions and warns that if the president is allowed to stonewall Congress without consequence future leaders “will feel empowered to resist an investigation into their own wrongdoing, malfeasance, or corruption.”
“It also puts in historical context the obstruction this president has employed to resist the impeachment inquiry and goes through how former presidents — Andrew Johnson to Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton — all three of those presidents who hated the inquiry all acknowledged Congress had the authority to do the investigation,” Welch said.
Now that the intelligence committee has completed its probe, the inquiry shifts to the judiciary panel, which will review the report and decide if the allegations against Trump are consistent with the articles of impeachment.
The judiciary committee is not expected to take long with process and the full House widely is expected to vote in favor of impeaching the president before the end of the year.
Trump and his Republican surrogates in Congress have maintained the president did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine and that Democrats have continued a “witch hunt” to remove him from office since he entered the White House in 2017.
On Dec. 3, Zelensky gave an interview to Time Magazine and three European media outlets in which he denied, as he has in the past, that he and Trump ever discussed a decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine in a quid pro quo involving opening a politically motivated investigation into Hunter Biden.
Trump quickly took to Twitter proclaiming the “case over” for the Democrats.
Zelensky added, however, that he was dismayed the White House had blocked the military aid for months after Congress had approved it.
“If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us,” Zelensky told Time. “I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo.”
Welch said the impeachment process has very little do with what Zelensky has said and done as the Ukraine leader continues to fight a hot war with Russia and looks to the U.S. as an ally.
“This is not about Zelensky,” Welch said. “It’s really what the president did and what the president said and had others do on his behalf, that is the question.”
