Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff of California argued Tuesday that only the extraordinary measure of impeachment would ensure a free and fair election next year.
Announcing formal articles of impeachment alongside Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Schiff also repeated the debunked claim that Trump cheated in the first election, despite a two-year special counsel investigation with unlimited resources finding otherwise.
“The argument ‘why don’t you just wait?’ amounts to this. Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time?” Schiff questioned. “The president’s misconduct goes to the heart of whether we can conduct a free and fair election in 2020.”
In other words, the only election Democrats will accept the results of is an election without Donald Trump. Impeachment and conviction not only removes the president from office, but it disqualifies the removed individual from even seeking that office again. Democrats are therefore trying to ban Trump from ever holding power in the White House again.
While Democrats often questioned whether Trump would respect the results of the election throughout 2016, Democrats have yet to accept the election results themselves three years later and have been attempting to impeach Trump since day one of the Trump presidency. The Washington Post even ran a headline just minutes after Trump took the presidential oath reading, “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”
The partisan impeachment efforts have been the Democrats’ latest, and closest attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election after several other attempts have already failed, including the collapse of the grand Russian collusion conspiracy, which, as evidenced by Schiff’s press conference, many Democrats still believe.
This week’s articles of impeachment introduced by Democrats follow several weeks of hearings focusing on the question of whether this time, Trump conspired with a foreign leader to interfere in the next U.S. presidential election. The allegations center on a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky where Trump allegedly demanded his Ukraine counterpart to launch an investigation into the Biden family in exchange for approximately $400 million in military aid.
An unredacted transcript of the July phone call was declassified and released to the public prior to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opening of a House investigation revealing no such quid pro quo. Instead, the transcript illustrates an American president condemning corruption in Ukraine, urging the Ukrainian president to combat the problem and investigate the origins of the European nation’s involvement in peddling the Russian hoax. Pelosi however, plunged the Democrats into impeachment proceedings where Schiff held secret hearings in the basement of the capitol for more than a month pre-interviewing witnesses before a public impeachment investigation was voted on by the full House chamber in a partisan vote on Halloween.
Throughout the public process, Democrats failed to bring to light any hard incriminating evidence against the president, and in fact, Democrats’ own star witnesses offered testimony vindicating the president.
Multiple witnesses called by Democrats said they saw the president engage in no such crime or quid pro quo involving the Ukrainian president.
