Here’s a super late recap of impeachment week.

Trump is working overtime to take the spotlight off impeachment this week. He and House Democrats announce an agreement on the updates to NAFTA, the House passes a package that includes Trump’s Space Force and expands paid parental leave, and Congress announces a spending agreement to avert a government shutdown. Meanwhile, over a dozen major newspaper editorial boards call for Trump’s impeachment.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending December 22…

General Happenings:

1. Trump sends a letter to Nancy Pelosi blasting the impeachment process. In it, he claims there’s no constitutional basis for the articles of impeachment (there is) and that Democrats are only doing this because they’re still mad about the 2016 election.

• • He even brings up Trump Derangement Syndrome. In official presidential correspondence.
  • He accuses Representative Adam Schiff of lying and cheating. Again, in official presidential correspondence.
  • He repeats so much misinformation about Biden, Ukraine, Zelensky, his accomplishments, Mueller’s investigation, and so on. I don’t have the time to debunk them all, but I did go through his list of accomplishments. Here’s what I found.
  • Word has it that the administration worked for days on this letter, but still it reads like a child with a thesaurus wrote it. You can read it here.

2. Documents released under a FOIA request show that defense officials and diplomats were worried that the administration was breaking the law by holding up military aid to Ukraine. Unfortunately, the documents are too redacted to get the full story.

• • Emails among the documents show that Trump asked about the Ukraine aid a month before his July 25 call with Zelensky. He had just seen the June 19 article in the Washington Examiner, which triggered the inquiry.
  • After Trump’s inquiry, Michael Duffey requested more information from the Pentagon and told them to keep the inquiry quiet.
  • The documents also show that officials ordered a hold on aid roughly an hour after the call with Zelensky.

3. Mike Pence refuses to declassify relevant testimony from Jennifer Williams, Pence’s advisor on Russia. Her testimony indicates that Pence might have known about Trump’s plans and activities around Ukraine.
4. Over 700 historians and legal scholars sign on to an open letter urging the House to impeach. This comes on top of a letter from 500 law professors saying that Trump committed impeachable offenses.
5. The top U.S. official to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, will leave his post sometime next month. He was a key witness in the impeachment hearings.

House Judiciary Committee:

1. The House Judiciary Committee releases its report explaining the articles of impeachment.

• • In the report, they accuse Trump of multiple federal crimes and say he betrayed the country by abusing the power of the office.
  • The federal crimes include bribery and wire fraud.
  • The report is long—658 pages—and I’ll just come right out and admit I haven’t read it yet.

2. The committee recommends two articles of impeachment, which were described in my previous post on impeachment news.

Impeachment Vote:

1. The night before the impeachment vote, hundreds of thousands of Americans gather in over 500 locations for “Nobody is Above the Law” rallies to call for Trump’s impeachment.

2. After six hours of debate, the House votes mostly along party lines to impeach Trump on the two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. They call him a national security threat and recommend removing him from office. He’s only the third president in history to be impeached.
3. Democrats in conservative districts for the most part vote for impeachment. Around three dozen votes were in question, but in the end, only two Democratic Representatives vote against the first article and three vote against the second. (One Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, votes “Present.”)

• • One of the nay votes, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, switched his party affiliation to Republican after polling found that voting against impeachment would make sure his constituents wouldn’t re-elect him.
  • Van Drew blames Democrats for not allowing any differences of opinion in the party, even though his polling was of the people who put him in office.
  • He appears with Trump in a televised meeting and pledges his undying loyalty to Trump.
  • Six of his aides resign on the announcement.
  • I’m not sure how he’s going to do with his newfound conservatism; he’s voted Democratic pretty much all of his career and voted against Trump policies around 90% of the time.

4. You can read the articles of impeachment here. They aren’t that long.
5. During the impeachment debate, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) says that Democrats just want to make Hillary Clinton president and warns that they (meaning Republicans) would just impeach the next president.

• • Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) points out that if Trump is removed, Pence becomes president, not Hillary Clinton. Seriously. Who doesn’t know this?
  • In response, a group of Republicans on the floor starts clapping and cheering. I’m confused. Were they cheering for impeachment? Cheering for Pence getting impeached? It was a weird moment.

6. Also during the debate, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) compares Trump to Jesus, and says, “When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this president in this process.”

• • It’s important to remember that Trump has had opportunities to participate in the impeachment process, but has refused (not just for himself but for his senior aides as well).

7. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) compares the impeachment to Pearl Harbor.

8. The debate was such a rumble, that Jennifer Rubin tweets: “The gap in character and intellect between the two parties is stunning.”

Post-Impeachment:

1. The articles of impeachment now need to be sent to the Senate, but Nancy Pelosi won’t say when she’ll do that.

2. Mitch McConnell has already said there won’t be a fair trial, so Pelosi is holding on to the articles for now while the Senate decides the rules of the trial.
3. A group of Democrats wants Nancy Pelosi to hold on to the articles of impeachment to prevent the Senate from discarding the case.
4. McConnell raises himself to some unexpected hyperbole, calling Pelosi too afraid to transmit “their shoddy work product” and calling the impeachment inquiry “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair” in modern history.
5. McConnell also says Pelosi can keep her articles of impeachment because he doesn’t want a trial.
6. After Trump is impeached, Putin says the charges against Trump are completely made up and adds:

• • “The Democratic Party, which lost the elections, is now trying to revise this history through the means that they have at their disposal — first by accusing Trump of collusion with Russia. But then it turned out there was no collusion.”

7. The House tells a federal appeals court that they still need access to the grand jury information that was redacted from the Mueller report. They’re specifically looking for information about Ukraine.
8. Trump administration officials threaten to veto the spending bill if Congress doesn’t remove language that would require future military aid to Ukraine to be released promptly. The language is ultimately removed, but a veto would’ve caused a government shutdown.
9. The White House wants to feature Trump’s biggest House allies in the Senate impeachment trial. They’re looking for ways to include Jim Jordan, John Ratcliffe, Mike Johnson, and Mark Meadows. Personally, I’ve had enough of Jim Jordan’s wailing. The first three meet with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to discuss it.
10. Senate Democrats want the following to testify in a Senate impeachment hearing, but Mitch McConnell says there will be no witnesses:

• • Mick Mulvaney, White House acting chief of staff
  • Robert Blair, advisor to Mulvaney
  • John Bolton, former national security advisor
  • Michael Duffey, Office of Management and Budget official who took over approving the delays in distributing the aid to Ukraine

11. McConnell seems to have convinced Trump that a short, two-week trial with no witnesses is in his best interest.
12. The Evangelical publication Christianity Today starts a small shit storm when it publishes an editorial calling for Trump to be impeached.

• • Christianity Today previously called for Clinton’s and Nixon’s impeachments over their moral failures.
  • While the editorial does concede certain things to Trump, it also says that Trump did abuse the powers of his office and that he’s dumbed down the idea of morality. The editorial includes this warning to evangelical Christians:
  • “Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?”
  • Also, the editor gets called “Christian elite” by critics who take earlier comments by him out of context.
  • In response, the Christian Post publishes a rebuttal, which causes one of their editors to resign.

  • If you have time, this is a great listen. On Point talks to both the author of the editorial and the editor of the Christian Post defending evangelicals.

More Trouble for Giuliani:

1. The night before the impeachment vote, Giuliani calls New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel to let him know that both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were aware of the smear campaign against former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and that they were instrumental in having her removed from her post.

• • Giuliani also told the New Yorker that he needed Yovanovitch out of the way and she was making the investigations difficult for everybody.
  • Even though there’s no evidence of any of this (or if there is, it’s being withheld by the administration for some strange reason), Trump and Pompeo acted on it.
  • He later walks it back and says he didn’t need her out of the way, but she had to be removed because she’s corrupt (again, with no evidence).

2. Giuliani says he has proof that the impeachment is a coverup for malfeasance by Democrats, but doesn’t explain what he means.
3. Giuliani suggests that Biden orchestrated the poisoning of Shokin, the former Ukraine prosecutor who was ousted for corruption. Shokin claims he died and then was brought back to life and then was poisoned again and brought back to life again.
4. Lindsey Graham invites Giuliani to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee about what he learned on his trip to Ukraine earlier this month.
5. Giuliani says that Trump is very supportive of him continuing to look in Ukraine for dirt on Democrats.