Congressional arguments about President Trump’s impeachment are scheduled for Monday just as the Justice Department report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse will be released.
That sets up contrasting narratives about abuse of power from Democrats and Republicans over whether federal law enforcement abused theirs or Trump abused his.
Democrats have spent weeks interviewing witnesses and holding public hearings to try to build the case that Trump committed impeachable offenses in his dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and by allegedly leveraging military aid to target political rival Joe Biden, while Republicans have dismissed the process as a partisan and baseless witch hunt. Both sides will get the chance to present their divergent findings before the House Judiciary Committee Monday as the House gets close to a vote on whether Trump should be removed from office.
Democrats scheduled the hearing for the same day DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz makes public his conclusions on possible wrongdoing by the DOJ and the FBI in carrying out secret surveillance of the Trump campaign. Democrats have spent much of Trump’s presidency defending law enforcement actions during the Trump-Russia investigation in 2016 and beyond, while Republicans have spent months hyping Horowitz’s report as a damning expose of allegedly politicized and criminal behavior.
The Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee said it 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” which “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.”
“A President faithful only to himself — who will sell out democracy and national security for his own personal advantage — is a danger to every American. Indeed, he threatens America itself,” the committee staff said in a report Saturday. “Our Constitution rejects pretensions to monarchy and binds Presidents with law. A President who sees no limit on his power manifestly threatens the Republic.”
Republicans have dismissed these dramatic claims.
“The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor,” Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said last week.
And Republicans claimed in November that “Democrats want to impeach President Trump because unelected and anonymous bureaucrats disagreed with the President’s decisions and were discomforted by his telephone conversation with President Zelensky,” contrary to the way the government works, because “the federal bureaucracy works for the President and the President works for the American people.”
But Democrats are on the defensive about allegations of FISA abuse.
A 2018 memo released by the then-Republican-led Intelligence Committee contended the FISA surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page had been improperly sought and obtained.
“Our findings raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process,” the memo states.
Committee Democrats released their own memo the next month.
“FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign,” they stated, claiming federal investigators “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”
Republicans pushed back.
“The American people now clearly understand that the FBI used political dirt paid for by the Democratic Party to spy on an American citizen from the Republican Party,” said the memo released by then-Chairman Devin Nunes, a California Republican.
That’s a message Republicans have continued to hammer for nearly two years.
The DOJ and the FBI launched an investigation in July 2016 into possible connections between Russia and Trump’s campaign in his race against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the agencies relied upon the salacious and unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who had been hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS which was in turn being paid by the Clinton campaign, in pursuing secret surveillance warrants beginning in October 2016. This inquiry was wrapped into Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation following his appointment in May 2017, and Horowitz announced his own inquiry into FISA abuse in March 2018. Trump’s July 25 controversial phone call with Zelesnky occurred the day after lackluster congressional testimony by Mueller.
Democratic and GOP legal counsels being forced to lay out their impeachment arguments in the House on Monday, combined with Horowitz’s estimated 500-page report on the investigation into possible surveillance court abuse, may help sort facts from spin. The revelations, though, will likely lead to further battles.
If the Democratic House does vote to impeach Trump, the impeachment battle will head to the Republican-led Senate, where the GOP is considering calling a series of witnesses it thinks could dismantle the Democratic narrative.
And if the Horowitz report doesn’t deliver on GOP hopes, some Republicans, including Trump, will likely look to a separate investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia inquiry by Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham.
