It's been nearly three weeks since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) formally announced an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
Pelosi had resisted growing calls to begin impeachment proceedings for nearly a year, but when Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his possible 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, Pelosi said that Trump had given the House no choice.
The impeachment inquiry has already yielded some disturbing revelations, and the House is beginning to lay out its case.
Pelosi's office recently released a three-page fact sheet regarding Trump's troubling use of diplomacy for personal gain.
https://www.scribd.com/document/431368353/Trump-Shakedown-and-Coverup#from_embed
The sheet begins with the Ukraine call—which it labels "the shakedown"—and lists multiple quotes from the rough transcript of the call released by the White House itself.
It then goes on to implicate Vice President Mike Pence who reportedly told Ukrainian officials that previously promised military aid due to fears that the country wasn't doing enough to combat corruption. Days later, the phone call between Zelensky and Trump occurred, leading lawmakers to question whether the two were connected.
The third page highlights text messages between then-Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland; Ukrainian Envoy Kurt Volker, and Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor:
"Text messages between [the] Ambassadors...paint the picture of a President who waged a months-long pressure campaign to shakedown Ukraine for his own personal political gain, potentially using a White House presidential visit and critical military assistance to Ukraine as leverage."
[9/1/19, 12:08:57 PM] Bill Taylor: Are we now saying that security assistance and WHmeeting are conditioned on investigations?[9/1/19, 12:42:29 PM] Gordon Sondland: Call me
The final page of the fact sheet details the coverup of the corrupt Zelensky call, citing the whistleblower complaint corroborated by the White House's own transcript of the call. It details efforts to put the full transcript of the call on a separate White House server with a higher security clearance, suggesting officials knew the conversation that took place on the call was corrupt.
The complaint states:
"[S]enior White House officials had intervened to 'lock down' all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call...the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system...used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature."
The fact sheet will undoubtedly prove useful as the inquiry continues with more key players coming forward and more misinformation being lobbed to discredit it.
The President and his allies have been hard at work attempting to discredit the inquiry, with Trump using familiar words like "witch hunt" and even comparing constitutional oversight to a "lynching."
Thankfully, Pelosi's team is laying out the facts.
