Democrats’ road map for impeaching President Trump is here. The House Intelligence Committee, which with the committees on Oversight and Foreign Affairs has been investigating allegations that Trump manipulated U.S.-Ukraine relations for his political benefit, on Tuesday released its report on its findings.
Intelligence Committee members will vote on it Tuesday night, and the House Judiciary Committee will take over from there. That committee is planning to write articles of impeachment within a week or so, and the full House is expected to vote on whether to impeach Trump by Christmas.
On Monday, Republicans involved in the impeachment inquiry released their own report, which fails to rebut the facts as we know them.
Here are five takeaways from the report.

1. Democrats lay out why Trump should be impeached.

“The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election,” the executive summary of their report reads.
How Democrats pieced together that allegation gives us clues as to what they think some of the articles of impeachment should be. Like:
Abuse of power: This is described throughout the report, such as here:
President Trump used the power of the Office of the President and exercised his authority over the executive branch, including his control of the instruments of the federal government, to apply increasing pressure on the President of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government to announce the politically-motivated investigations desired by President Trump.
And later, they write that asking Ukraine to investigate Democrats “was the act of a president who viewed himself as unaccountable and determined to use his vast official powers to secure his reelection.”
Obstruction of Congress: This allegation is an entire section of the report, encompassing more than 50 pages. Democrats point out that an article of impeachment drawn up against Richard M. Nixon was for his failure to comply with subpoenas. Here’s their central allegation:
President Trump ordered and implemented a campaign to conceal his conduct from the public and frustrate and obstruct the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry by refusing to produce to the impeachment inquiry’s investigating Committees information and records in the possession of the White House, in defiance of a lawful subpoena; directing executive branch agencies to defy lawful subpoenas and withhold the production of all documents and records from the investigating Committees; directing current and former executive branch officials not to cooperate with the Committees, including in defiance of lawful subpoenas for testimony; and intimidating, threatening, and tampering with prospective and actual witnesses in the impeachment inquiry in an effort to prevent, delay, or influence the testimony of those witnesses.
Compromising national security:
By withholding vital military assistance and diplomatic support from a strategic foreign partner government engaged in an ongoing military conflict illegally instigated by Russia, President Trump compromised national security to advance his personal political interests.
Faced with the revelation of his actions, President Trump publicly and repeatedly persisted in urging foreign governments, including Ukraine and China, to investigate his political opponent. This continued solicitation of foreign interference in a U.S. election presents a clear and present danger that the President will continue to use the power of his office for his personal political gain.
This report touches on the fact that the Ukraine allegations stemmed from an effort to undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, but it doesn’t solve the internal debate among Democrats about whether to fold the Mueller report’s findings that Trump tried to undermine the special counsel into the impeachment articles.
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2. Trump’s White House gave Democrats their most solid evidence.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Oct. 17 that there was a quid pro quo when President Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine. (Reuters)
Democrats weren’t able to pin down that Trump himself explicitly laid out a quid pro quo with Ukraine when he held up Ukraine’s military aid and an Oval Office meeting. Because top Trump aides wouldn’t comply with subpoenas, the inquiry relied on people who hadn’t directly communicated with the president to paint a picture of what he wanted. U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified he heard this through Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and others implicated Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, in the quid pro quo.
So Democrats’ most solid evidence pinning the quid pro quos to Trump came from things people in the Trump administration did and said. Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky features heavily in the Intelligence Committee’s summary of why Trump should be impeached, taking up 10 pages. A key line:
During a July 25, 2019, call between President Trump and President Zelensky, President Zelensky expressed gratitude for U.S. military assistance. President Trump immediately responded by asking President Zelensky to “do us a favor though” and openly pressed for Ukraine to investigate former vice president Biden and the 2016 conspiracy theory. In turn, President Zelensky assured President Trump that he would pursue the investigation and reiterated his interest in the White House meeting.
As Democrats note in their report, they aren’t alone in this analysis of the call being damaging for Trump. It was also referenced in many witnesses’ testimony as the moment it clicked that Trump had held up the military aid to Ukraine so that he had leverage to demand investigations. “I guess for me it shed some light on possible other motivations behind a security assistance hold,” testified Jennifer Williams, a Russia adviser to Vice President Pence. “There was no doubt,” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the White House’s top Ukraine expert, testified when asked if he heard a political quid pro quo in that call.
Mulvaney did not comply with a subpoena to testify, but his public comments make their way to the top lines in the report: “At a press conference weeks after public revelations about the scheme, Mr. Mulvaney publicly acknowledged that the President directly tied the hold on military aid to his desire to get Ukraine to conduct a political investigation, telling Americans to ‘get over it.’ ” (Mulvaney tried to walk back those comments later the same day.)
The report also tries to counteract any attempts by Trump to push Giuliani under the bus, by using Giuliani’s own words. Here’s the tweet they held up:

3. Democrats describe broad complicity in the Trump administration.

Pence. Mulvaney. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Former energy secretary Rick Perry. Senior White House aides. They’re all implicated in this report. They “had knowledge of, in some cases facilitated and furthered the President’s scheme, and withheld information about the scheme from the Congress and the American public,” Democrats write.
They rely heavily on the testimony from Sondland, who was the closest Trump ally that Democrats got to testify. Sondland testified that as he negotiated political quid pro quos with Ukraine, he looped in all of these senior officials. He brought emails and text messages to his public hearing as proof.
In particular, Sondland stated his belief in a meeting with Pence that the release of military aid to Ukraine was tied to the Ukrainians announcing the launch of investigations. Sondland said Pence didn’t express his objections.
The report’s authors include as evidence that Pence was in on Trump’s efforts the fact that the vice president spoke to Zelensky in September, after Sondland told Ukrainians there were conditions on getting their military aid — and that Pence won’t share the transcript of his call.
Pence has said he has “no recollection of any discussions” with Sondland before the Zelensky meeting.

4. Devin Nunes’s name is repeatedly listed in the report.

Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is mentioned in the report dozens of times, and not just in his role as a counterpart to the leadership of the investigation. A former Nunes staff member is on the National Security Council, and the report says this staffer, Kash Patel, talked with Giuliani at a key moment in the pressure campaign and may have found a way to talk to the president about Ukraine, even though it wasn’t in his portfolio. The report also shows records of several phone exchanges between Giuliani and Nunes in April, as the campaign to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine and oust the American ambassador there was ramping up.
(House Intelligence Committee report)
(House Intelligence Committee report)
The report doesn’t fill out Nunes’s role, but it provides some records that are consistent with the allegation by an indicted Ukrainian American, Lev Parnas, that Nunes was involved in this. (Nunes has said stories reporting this are “demonstrably false” but did not issue a direct denial when asked about his involvement with Ukrainians.)

5. They feel the need to impeach fast.

Democrats are pursuing Trump’s impeachment without hearing from top former aides, some of whom may have spoken directly to Trump about this and seem willing to testify. (We’re specifically thinking of former national security adviser John Bolton, who has said he’ll abide by the results of an ongoing lawsuit from another NSC official about what carries more weight, a subpoena from Congress or a White House ban on complying with that subpoena.)
The Democrats have faced some criticism for that, both inside and outside Congress. If they waited a few more months, could they connect the political quid pro quos to Trump without a shred of doubt? Instead, they are rushing to impeach Trump before it’s officially a presidential election year. To defend that rushed timing, they made an interesting argument in this report: that Trump might do this again if he’s not impeached ASAP.
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.
Of course, that argument ignores the fact that barring any major defections from Senate Republicans in a trial, Trump could be impeached by the House and remain president, free to negotiate with other countries as he sees fit.