"Our oath means something to us"- Rep. Adam Schiff

Speaker Nancy Pelosi "We must act now."

I want to turn now to Chairman Adam Schiff, who will explain the evidence that supports these articles and the need for us to act with such urgency today.

Rep. Adam Schiff gave a flawless and fact filled speech at the Donald Trump impeachment announcement, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Adler. 

Chairman Schiff: 

The Framers of the Constitution recognized that someday, a president might come to office who would abuse that office, betray the public trust and undermine national security to secure foreign help in his re-election and who would seek to abrogate of the power of Congress to hold him accountable. They recognize this danger and they prescribed a remedy and that remedy is impeachment.

It is an extraordinary remedy and one that I have been reluctant to recommend until the actions of President Trump gave Congress no alternative. We stand here today because the President's continuing abuse of power left us no choice. To do nothing would make ourselves complicit in the President's abuse of his high office, the public trust, and our national security.

Donald Trump's presidential misconduct is as simple and as terrible as this: President Trump solicited a foreign nation, Ukraine, to publicly announce investigations into his opponent and a baseless theory promoted by Russia, to help his re-election campaign. President Trump abused the power of his office by conditioning two official acts to get Ukraine to help his re-election: the release of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that nation desperately needed and a White House meeting with an ally trying to fend off Russian aggression.

In so doing, he undermined our national security and jeopardized the integrity of our next election. And he does so still.

The evidence of the President's misconduct is overwhelming and uncontested. And how could it not be when the President’s own words on July 25th, ‘I would like you to do us a favor, though,’ laid so bare his intentions, his willingness to sacrifice the national security for his own personal interest.

And when the President got caught, he committed his second impeachable act: obstruction of Congress, the very ability to make sure that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States.

The evidence is every bit as strong that President Trump has obstructed Congress fully, without precedent and without basis in law. If allowed to stand, it would decimate Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of this President or any other in the future, leaving this President and those who followed to be free to be as corrupt, malfeasant or incompetent as they would like, with no prospect of discovery or accountability.


Now, some would argue, why don't you just wait? Why don't you just wait until you get the witnesses the White House refuses to produce? Why not just wait until you get the documents the White House refuses to turn over?

People should understand what that argument really means. It has taken us eight months to get a lower court ruling that Don McGahn has no absolute right to defy Congress. Eight months for one court decision. If it takes us another eight months to get a second court or maybe a Supreme Court decision, people need to understand that is not the end of the process. It comes back to us and we ask questions because he no longer has absolute immunity and he claims something else, that his answers are privileged and we have to go back to court for another eight or sixteen months.

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? That is what that argument amounts to.

The President's misconduct goes to the heart of whether or not we can conduct a free and fair election in 2020. It is bad enough for a candidate to invite foreign interference in our political process, but it is far more corrosive for a president to do so and to abuse his power to make it so.

Despite everything we have uncovered, the President’s misconduct continues to this day, unapologetically and right now. As we saw when he stood on the White House lawn and he was asked, ‘What did you want in that July 25th call?’ and he said the answer was a simple one. And not just a simple one on July 25th, but a simple one today, and that is, he still wants Ukraine to interfere in our election to help his campaign. Even this week, the President’s lawyer was back in Ukraine seeking to revive the same debunked conspiracy theory promoted at the President’s behest.

Which gets us to the final and most pernicious of the arguments that we have heard in the President’s defense. That the President thinks he can do whatever he wants under Article II, including get foreigners involved in our elections and we should just, to quote the President’s Chief of Staff, ‘get over it.’

Ben Franklin said we have a republic, if we can keep it. The President and his men say you can't keep it and Americans should just get over it. Americans don't get to decide American elections any more, not by themselves, not without foreign help.

For the Members of Congress, this is not a question of fact because the facts are not seriously contested; it is rather a question of duty. The President's oath of office appears to mean very little to him, but the articles put forward today give us a chance to show that we will defend the Constitution, and that our oath means something to us.