House Dems Release Impeachment Report Accusing Trump of Leveraging Aid for Political Benefit, Obstructing Resulting Probe

House Democrats released a report Tuesday outlining the case for impeachment against President Trump, drawing on evidence from past testimony to illustrate the president’s abuse of power.“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 300-page report argues.Democrats also highlight the repeated efforts by the White House to refuse subpoenas and withhold information as unprecedented. "It would be hard to imagine a stronger or more complete case of obstruction than that demonstrated by the President since the inquiry began," the report says.The report challenges the narrative laid out by House Republicans, who released their own report on Monday demonstrating that the evidence against Trump did not show “bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor,” facts reinforced by the transcript of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky."Our investigation determined that this telephone call was neither the start nor the end of President Trump’s efforts to bend U.S. foreign policy for his personal gain," Democrats counter. "Rather, it was a dramatic crescendo within a months-long campaign driven by President Trump in which senior U.S. officials, including the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Acting Chief of Staff, the Secretary of Energy, and others were either knowledgeable of or active participants in an effort to extract from a foreign nation the personal political benefits sought by the President."The report includes interviews with over a dozen witnesses, but also includes new information of call records showing communication between Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, disgraced associate Lev Parnas, and House Intelligence ranking member Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) — laying out evidence of a possible coordinated smear campaign of former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.“In making the decision to move forward, we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president,” Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) wrote in the preface to the report. “Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the President welcomed and utilized.”