Impeachment, he insists, will be “a positive for me.”
He knew it was coming. It almost felt inevitable. No other president in American history has been seriously threatened with impeachment since before his inauguration. So when the announcement came on Tuesday that the House would consider charging him with high crimes and misdemeanors, President Trump made clear he was ready for a fight.
He lashed out at the opposition Democrats, denouncing them for “crazy” partisanship. He denounced the allegations against him as “more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage.” And he proclaimed that even if the impeachment battle to come will be bad for the country, it will be “a positive for me” by bolstering his chances to win a second term in next year’s election.
The beginning of the long-anticipated showdown arrived when Mr. Trump was in New York for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, creating a surreal split-screen spectacle as the president sought to play global statesman while fending off his enemies back in Washington. One moment, he talked of war and peace and trade with premiers and potentates. The next, he engaged in a rear-guard struggle to save his presidency.
Mr. Trump gave a desultory speech and shuffled between meetings with leaders from Britain, India and Iraq while privately consulting with aides about his next move against the House. Shortly before heading into a lunch with the United Nations secretary general, he decided to release a transcript of his July telephone call with the president of Ukraine that is central to the allegations against him. In effect, he was pushing his chips into the middle of the table, gambling that the document would prove ambiguous enough to undercut the Democratic case against him.
By afternoon, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepared to announce the impeachment inquiry, the president retreated to Trump Tower, his longtime home and base of operations, to contemplate his path forward. A telephone call between the president and speaker failed to head off the clash, and now the two are poised for an epic struggle that will test the limits of the Constitution and the balance of power in the American system.
“We have been headed here inexorably,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, an impeachment scholar at the University of North Carolina. “The president has pushed and pushed his powers up to and beyond the normal boundaries. He’s been going too far for some time, but even for him this most recent misconduct is beyond what most of us, or most scholars, thought was possible for a president to do.”
Long reluctant, Ms. Pelosi finally moved after reports that Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine’s president to investigate unsubstantiated corruption allegations against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading Democratic candidate for president, while holding up $391 million in American aid to Ukraine. Democrats said leaning on a foreign power for dirt on an opponent crossed the line. Mr. Trump said he was only concerned about corruption in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump now joins only Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton in facing a serious threat of impeachment, the constitutional equivalent of an indictment.
Mr. Nixon resigned when fellow Republicans abandoned him over Watergate, but Mr. Johnson and Mr. Clinton were each acquitted in a Senate trial, the result that seems most likely at the moment given that conviction requires a two-thirds vote, meaning at least 20 Republican senators would have to break with Mr. Trump.
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Mr. Nixon and Mr. Clinton both were privately distraught over facing impeachment even as they waged vigorous public battles to defend themselves. Undaunted, Mr. Trump appeared energized by the confrontation, eager for battle. Confident of his position in the Republican-controlled Senate, he seemed almost to assume that the Democrat-controlled House would probably vote to impeach and that he would take his case to the public in next year’s election.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, an ally of the president’s, said Mr. Trump could afford to feel secure. He predicted the same thing would happen to Ms. Pelosi that happened to him in 1998, when he led a party-line impeachment inquiry of Mr. Clinton and paid the price in midterm elections, costing him the speakership.
Just as the public recoiled at the Republican impeachment then, Mr. Gingrich said, it will reject a Democratic impeachment now. Instead, he said, it will give Mr. Trump and the Republicans a chance to focus attention on Mr. Biden.
“This is the fight that traps the Democrats into an increasingly unpopular position — I lived through this in 1998 — while elevating the Biden case, which involves big money,” Mr. Gingrich said. “It is a win-win for Trump.”
His point on the popularity of impeachment was a critical one. Until now, at least, polls have shown that most Americans do not support impeaching Mr. Trump, just as they never embraced impeaching Mr. Clinton. And although how the latest allegations might ultimately change public opinion remained unclear, a new survey by Reuters and Ipsos released on Tuesday night suggested that support for impeachment had actually fallen since the Ukraine revelations, with just 37 percent in favor, down from 41 percent earlier this month.
Mr. Trump, though, has never been as popular as Mr. Clinton. During the 13-month battle that stretched from 1998 into 1999 over whether Mr. Clinton committed high crimes by lying under oath about his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton’s approval rating was generally in the mid-60s and even surged to 73 percent in the days after he was impeached.
Mr. Trump does not have the same reservoir of good will, never having had the support of a majority of Americans in Gallup polling for even a single day of his presidency. His approval rating currently stands at 43 percent. But he has the support of 91 percent of Republicans, giving him reason to assume the party’s senators will stick with him.
Brenda Wineapple, author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” said there were times when a stand on principle was worth it even with a short-term cost. “Some defeats can ultimately be victories — but often only in the long or historical view,” she said. “The Johnson impeachment ultimately failed,” she said, but in the end, she added, the system worked.
At this turning point in his presidency, Mr. Trump began the day in New York toggling between world affairs and political survival. Even before he took the rostrum at the United Nations to deliver a subdued, boilerplate speech, he sought out reporters to push back on the suggestion that he used American aid to leverage Ukrainian cooperation with his investigation demand.
Mr. Trump asserted that he blocked the aid to Ukraine because European countries have not paid their fair share. He pointed to the fact that the money was eventually released as evidence that he did nothing wrong. What he did not mention was that European countries have chipped in $15 billion for Ukraine in the last few years and that he released the American aid only after senators from both parties threatened punitive legislation if he did not.
What he also did not say was that he had changed his explanation for withholding the money from just a day before. On Monday, he linked his decision to block the aid to his concerns about corruption in Ukraine, citing Mr. Biden as an example. By emphasizing instead his overall concern about foreign aid, he was advancing a rationale less tied to his demand for an investigation.
“I’m leading in the polls and they have no idea how to stop me,” Mr. Trump said. “The only way they can try is through impeachment.”
In fact, Mr. Trump is trailing Mr. Biden and other Democrats seeking their party’s nomination in most polls, which is why Democrats assert he was so intent on obtaining dirt from Ukraine on the former vice president.
Either way, as stunning as the day’s developments were, the only real surprise was how long it took to get here. Mr. Trump’s critics began discussing impeachment within days of his election because of various ethical issues and Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. By last year’s midterm election, Mr. Trump repeatedly raised impeachment on the campaign trail, warning that Democrats would come after him if they won the House.
They did win, but the drive to impeachment stalled when the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, produced a report that established no criminal conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia while refusing to take a position on whether the president obstructed justice during the investigation.
As it turned out, Ukraine, not Russia, proved to be rocket fuel for the semi-dormant effort. Now, more than two and a half years later, the battle is on.
Trump Defends Delay of Aid to Ukraine
Administration’s review of military funds to the country is at center of broadening probe
President Trump on Monday suggested a link between his delay of military aid to Ukraine and what he said were concerns about corruption in the country, but he denied threatening to withhold the support if Kiev didn’t pursue an investigation of Joe Biden, his potential 2020 opponent.
“It’s very important to talk about corruption,” Mr. Trump said at a United Nations event. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?”
Later in the day, he said he didn’t draw that connection in a call with the president of Ukraine in July. “I did not make a statement that you have to do this or I won’t give you aid,” he said. “I didn’t put any pressure on them whatsoever.” But, he added: “I think it would probably, possibly have been OK if I did.”
Congress in fall 2018 had agreed to send $250 million to Ukraine to defend it against Russian aggression. But this summer, the president and his advisers, including then-national security adviser John Bolton and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, began discussing putting a hold on the funds while the administration reviewed them, a senior administration official said. In July, the administration decided to do just that, people familiar with the matter said.
On July 25, Mr. Trump in a phone call urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on a probe that would produce information about Mr. Biden and his son, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Giuliani had met with an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office the previous month to discuss such a probe.
Messrs. Trump and Giuliani have pressed for an inquiry into Mr. Biden’s anticorruption efforts in Ukraine while he was vice president and while his son Hunter Biden had business interests there. Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time said earlier this year he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son. On Saturday, Joe Biden said he had never discussed with his son any overseas business dealings and accused Mr. Trump of abusing his office.
The administration’s reason for putting a hold on the Ukraine funds—which for weeks this summer proved elusive to lawmakers who were eager for answers—is at the center of the expanding investigation on Capitol Hill into whether there was any connection between the review of foreign aid and efforts by the president and Mr. Giuliani to urge Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden. The examination of Mr. Trump’s dealings with his Ukrainian counterpart is likely to escalate this week as Congress continues to probe a whistleblower complaint concerning Mr. Trump, an aspect of which involves the Ukraine call, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ukrainian officials earlier this month expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure. “They worried the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence for their unwillingness at the time to investigate the Bidens,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), who earlier this month met in Ukraine with Mr. Zelensky and other officials.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment on Mr. Murphy’s remarks.
BIDENS IN UKRAINE: AN EXPLAINER
Joe Biden served as the Obama administration’s point person on relations with Ukraine and rooting out bureaucratic corruption, a role he took on shortly after Russia invaded the country in 2014.Around that time, Mr. Biden’s son Hunter took a board position with a Ukrainian natural-gas extraction company, Burisma Holdings Ltd., which some anticorruption advocates feared would undermine the elder Mr. Biden’s work. The White House said at the time that Hunter Biden’s work didn’t create a conflict of interest.
One of the targets of Mr. Biden’s ire, and that of most Western diplomats, was Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who they said wasn’t doing enough to weed out corruption. The owner of Mr. Biden’s company, Burisma, had been under the scrutiny of prosecutors, and President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have suggested that Mr. Biden’s interest in having Mr. Shokin fired was motivated by his trying to protect his son. But Mr. Shokin had dragged his feet on the investigations into Burisma’s owner, and the probe into the company was no longer active when Mr. Shokin was removed from office in 2016.
Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, said earlier this year he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son. Mr. Biden said he had never discussed with his son any overseas business dealings.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) called on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to launch an investigation touching on who directed the suspension of aid, saying it should be part of a broader probe. Mr. McConnell, speaking on the Senate floor, said he urged the administration to release its hold on the aid “throughout July, August and early September,” adding that he twice urged Mr. Esper to do so and made a similar plea to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The Democratic chairmen of the House foreign affairs, intelligence and oversight committees also sent a letter to Mr. Pompeo threatening to issue a subpoena if the department didn’t begin turning over related documents. The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
For weeks, as lawmakers lobbied Mr. Trump to release the Ukraine money personally and called officials across his administration, they kept getting shifting responses, according to multiple interviews over the past few weeks.
Mr. Trump himself told some lawmakers that other countries weren’t spending enough to bolster Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump reiterated that complaint.
Others in the administration offered different explanations. On Sept. 3, Vice President Mike Pence, who had met a day earlier with Mr. Zelensky, said that in the meeting, “as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”
That day, a bipartisan group of senators in a letter to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and the Office of Management and Budget said the funding was “crucial to the long term stability of Ukraine” and urged them to immediately release the funds.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee members were also receiving muddled answers. “There was a lot of consternation about why this was held up and what was going on,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), a member of the panel. “I don’t remember ever hearing a clear response about what the holdup was.”
Fed up, senators coalesced around an amendment that Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) had sought to attach to a fiscal 2020 defense-spending bill to force the release of funds to Ukraine. The day before the Senate Appropriations Committee was scheduled to vote, the White House released the military aid, along with $142 million in State Department funds.
Democrats are now raising questions about whether the president successfully enlisted others in the Trump administration to carry out the pressure campaign on Ukraine. The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine told Mr. Murphy earlier this month that it wasn’t involved in demanding the Ukrainian president mount an investigation, a statement that Mr. Murphy took as a sign that diplomats had refused to get involved because they believed such conduct was improper.
Trump Defends Conversation With Ukraine Leader
President calls for Kiev to investigate Biden as whistleblower complaint prompts congressional probe
WASHINGTON—President Trump defended a conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart as “totally appropriate” and reiterated his call for Kiev to investigate his potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden, as lawmakers look into the president’s and his lawyer’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to undertake such a probe.
Mr. Trump declined to say whether in a July conversation he had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to have his government investigate Mr. Biden, the former vice president and now Democratic presidential candidate. But, Mr. Trump told reporters Friday: “Somebody ought to look into that,” referring to Mr. Biden.
Any probe of Mr. Biden centers on the then-vice president’s efforts to seek the ouster of former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had investigated a private Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Group, of which Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a board member.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has accused Mr. Biden of acting to protect his son, even though Mr. Shokin had already completed his investigation of Burisma Group before he left office. Mr. Biden has said he sought Mr. Shokin’s ouster because he wasn’t doing enough to investigate corruption.
Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s current prosecutor general, told Bloomberg News in May he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son.
Mr. Trump, during an event at the White House with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, said he didn’t know the identity of the whistleblower. But he also accused the whistleblower of partisan motivations and said his conversation with Mr. Zelensky “couldn’t have been better.”
Asked whether the whistleblower complaint involved the July call with Mr. Zelensky, the president said: “I really don’t know.”
Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed inspector general of the intelligence community, met Thursday morning with the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-session. Mr. Atkinson declined to tell lawmakers the substance of the complaint or if it involves the president, but he did say it involves more than one episode and is based on a series of events, according to multiple people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.