US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called on House Democratic leaders to begin drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.
“Today, I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment,” she said Thursday, in what was billed as a special announcement about the “status” of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump. Lawmakers on two congressional committees have held impeachment hearings over the last few weeks.
Pelosi said the testimony proved that “the president’s actions have seriously violated the Constitution.”
“The facts are uncontested: The president abused his power,” she said. “The president leaves us no choice but to act.”
After several marathon days of hearings in November, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released a detailed report Tuesday. In the report, they laid out “overwhelming” evidence of misconduct by Trump.
Chiefly, they concluded that his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pressuring him to investigate 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, represented “stark evidence of misconduct; a demonstration of the President’s prioritization of his personal political benefit over the national interest.”
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee began its own set of impeachment hearings, featuring testimony from constitutional law scholars.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham responded by claiming that “Pelosi and the Democrats should be ashamed.”
“We look forward to a fair trial in the Senate,” she tweeted following Pelosi’s announcement.