If the two impeachment charges – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – are approved by the full House of Representatives in a vote expected next week, it would put Trump in the historic position of being the third US leader ever impeached and placed on trial in the Senate, AFP reported.

“Our president holds the ultimate public trust,” said House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler.

“When he betrays that trust and puts himself before country, he endangers the constitution, he endangers our democracy and he endangers our national security.”

Nadler, in a solemn and deeply serious moment for the nation, was joined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the US Capitol to lay out the charges facing Trump.

The president is alleged to have wielded the power of the presidency for personal and political gain by pressuring Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 US election.

His accusers say he conditioned vital military aid and a much-sought White House meeting on Kyiv announcing it would investigate Democratic former vice president Joe Biden, who is the frontrunner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

He also pressed his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to probe a debunked Kremlin conspiracy theory that it was Kyiv and not Moscow, that interfered in the 2016 US election.

The charges also focus on Trump’s efforts to block Congress from fully investigating his actions – which Democrats see as a violation of its constitutional right to conduct oversight of the executive branch.

“The evidence of the president’s misconduct is overwhelming and uncontested,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who oversaw weeks of public hearings in which witnesses including Trump administration officials and US diplomats testified about the pressure on Ukraine.

“To do nothing would make ourselves complicit in the president’s abuse of his high office,” Schiff said, adding that Trump’s “misconduct goes to the heart of whether we can conduct a free and fair election in 2020.”

Trump, who has long assailed the Democrats for pursuing impeachment, maintained his fighting posture early Tuesday, tweeting that the effort to oust him as “sheer Political Madness!”