TEHRAN (Iran News) – Impeachment charges against President Donald Trump went to the full House on Friday, following approval by the House Judiciary Committee.

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But Republicans demanded that Joe Biden’s son Hunter, the lawmaker leading the impeachment probe Adam Schiff, and the whistleblower at the origin of the inquiry all testify next week before the House Judiciary Committee.

“As you know, your impeachment inquiry is completely baseless and has violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness,” White House chief lawyer Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to the committee chair, Jerry Nadler.

“House Democrats have wasted enough of America’s time with this charade. You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings,” he wrote, AFP reported.

Cipollone issued the letter minutes before a deadline to declare whether the White House would deploy representatives to defend Trump against accusations he abused his office by pressuring Ukraine to find dirt on former vice president Biden, his potential challenger in the 2020 election.

Nadler’s committee is to meet starting Monday to review the evidence from investigators and decide whether to charge Trump with abuse of power, bribery, and obstruction.

Those charges could become articles of impeachment sent to the full House to vote on within weeks.

If they pass the Democratic-led House as expected, it would make Trump only the third president in US history to be impeached.

That would set up a trial next month in the Republican-controlled Senate, seen as likely to acquit him.

Trump is accused of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations into Biden and his son, and also into a widely-dismissed theory that Ukraine helped Democrats in the 2016 election.

The US leader is accused of demanding Zelensky announce the investigations in exchange for the release of military aid and a high-profile summit — which Democrats say constitutes bribery.

Democrats also say Trump’s actions amount to soliciting foreign interference in American elections — which is barred by US laws.

Trump denies any wrongdoing but has refused to cooperate with the inquiry, citing his privilege as president to prevent top aides from testifying.

Cipollone told Nadler in the letter that adopting articles of impeachment “would be a reckless abuse of power” and constitute “the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our nation’s history.”

He repeated Trump’s tweet of Thursday: “If you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our country can get back to business.”

In a statement, Nadler accused Trump of continuing to block “key evidence” from Congress.

“We gave President Trump a fair opportunity to question witnesses and present his own to address the overwhelming evidence before us,” Nadler said.

“If the President has no good response to the allegations, then he would not want to appear before the committee. Having declined this opportunity, he cannot claim that the process is unfair.”

Meanwhile, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Doug Collins, announced a list of witnesses his camp wishes to subpoena “to provide context and transparency about the underlying facts at issue.”

Besides Schiff, the list includes Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer, who both sat on the board of a Ukraine energy company Burisma, which Trump allegedly pressured Zelensky to investigate.

Also included were the whistleblower, believed to be a CIA analyst who reported his concerns about Trump’s demands of Zelensky; possible government contracts of the whistleblower; White House national security official Alexander Vindman, whose earlier testimony strongly supported the allegations against Trump.

With the exception of Vindman, there was little likelihood Nadler would accept the witness list.

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Their emerging gambit is prompting Trump’s GOP defenders — who have long struggled to coalesce around a coherent strategy of their own — to launch a fresh counterattack, warning that a rush to condemn the President proves the Democratic case is shallow and politically motivated.

The showdown over timing emerged from the first House Judiciary Committee hearing on impeachment Wednesday, which shifted the debate from the specific facts of Trump’s alleged wrongdoing to the appropriate constitutional consequences that he should face.

The dispute over how fast to go and over the scope of the Democratic impeachment case spilled over — in far more civil and respectful terms than the bitter exchanges between lawmakers — in a debate between four renowned law professors asked to testify to the committee on the mechanics and justifications of impeachment.

Three of the four, who were invited by Democrats, agreed that the President’s transgressions were already sufficiently severe to justify the ultimate political sanction of impeachment. The fourth, a Republican invitee, urged Democrats to slow down and to exhaust the full extent of the law to compel testimony from key witnesses before making a case to the nation that Trump should be removed.

The controversy over whether Democrats are rushing to judgment offers both sides new strategic options in an increasingly vitriolic collision over whether Trump abused his power in pressuring Ukraine for favors ahead of the 2020 election and a way to compress a case brimming with overwhelming details, unfamiliar foreign actors and profound principles of governance into an understandable narrative.

And it gives each side a measure of constitutional cover for the less lofty factors that are really shaping their calculations — the public’s tolerance for an extended impeachment duel and its impact on the 2020 election.

“Are you ready?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked her caucus on Wednesday, setting the stage for an accelerated timetable that could see Trump impeached by the full House before the Christmas and New Year break.

The speaker is also quietly taking the temperature of her caucus before making a final decision on the end game of the House process — and how widely to draw articles of impeachment, CNN’s Manu Raju reported on Wednesday.

In the hearing, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler warned in increasingly dire terms that Democrats had no choice but to swiftly move against the President to protect the nation.

“If we do not act to hold him in check now, President Trump will almost certainly try again to solicit interference in the election for his personal, political benefit,” the New York Democrat warned — implicitly rejecting a Republican argument that Trump’s fate should be left to voters to decide this close to the November 2020 election.

But Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the committee, pivoted from the Democrats’ urgency to frame the latest in a bewildering sequence of Republican defenses of Trump, most of which have avoided a damaging pattern of facts about his conduct.

“They want to do it before the end of the year — ‘we’re scared of the elections, that we’ll lose again,'” he said, paraphrasing a purported Democratic justification for impeaching Trump quickly to avoid a supposed voter backlash.

“The clock and the calendar are what’s driving impeachment,” Collins warned. “Not the facts.”

Republican criticism that Democrats are moving too quickly past a process they have themselves sought to obstruct at every turn is disingenuous — and raises the question of why Nadler did not demand they join Democrats in forcing out the key material the White House is trying to keep hidden.

But this approach at least offers more intellectual ballast than any previous GOP impeachment defense, as laid out by the minority’s witness at the hearing, Jonathan Turley.

The George Washington University Law School professor argued Trump’s actions — allegedly withholding military aid to coerce Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden — were not impeachable. But he didn’t rule out that an extended impeachment investigation could eventually find a case to answer.

And he criticized Democrats for not using the courts and the full extent of the law to force testimony from key witnesses and secure documents that the White House has refused to provide.

“Impeachments require a certain period of saturation and maturation. That is, the public has to catch up,” Turley said, arguing that a “fast and narrow” impeachment would create a dangerous precedent for future presidencies.

“I’m not prejudging what your record would show,” he said.

“But if you rush this impeachment, you’re going to leave half the country behind,” Turley said, making a case that impeachment was such a solemn task that every leader must be run to earth in order to convince the American people that such a draconian step cutting to the heart of US democracy is appropriate.

“This isn’t an impulse-buy item. You’re trying to remove a duly elected president of the United States.”

Turley’s approach has more constitutional credibility than previous Republican efforts to discredit the investigation as a partisan hoax or to adopt Trump’s stream of misinformation designed to create doubt about damaging facts in the minds of voters — including the hard-to-believe claim that he withheld aid to Ukraine from a long-standing concern about corruption.

It was also more believable than the Trump campaign’s mocking claim in an email Wednesday that the hearing — on a vital constitutional issue that ought to be considered with all due seriousness — was “a snoozer.”

This fresh defense also could emerge as an option for Republicans who want to vote to acquit Trump for political reasons in a Senate trial but who chafe at hysterical arguments of their House colleagues — including the idea that Ukraine mounted a huge Russia-style effort to interfere in the 2016 election.

Democrats used their witnesses to paint a picture of abuses of power by Trump of such staggering proportions that his immediate removal is the only way to secure America’s democracy.

All three law professors called by the majority agreed that Trump had committed multiple impeachable offenses, in the commission of the Ukraine scheme and obstructing Congress in covering it up.

“The evidence reveals a President who used the powers of his office to demand a foreign government participate in undermining a competing candidate for the presidency,” said Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law professor.

Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman warned: “If we cannot impeach a President who abuses his office for personal advantage, we no longer live in a democracy.”

“We live in a monarchy or we live under a dictatorship. That is why the framers created the possibility of impeachment.”

University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt argued that the President’s attempts to thwart the impeachment investigation by Trump had reached historic levels.

“In this situation, the full-scale obstruction of those subpoenas I think torpedoes separation of powers,” he said.

“Therefore, your only recourse is to in a sense protect your institutional prerogatives, and that would include impeachment.”

While the House Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday did underline the obstruction angle as a rationale for impeachment, Democrats have so far focused mostly on the facts of the President’s back-office foreign policy scheme to pressure the government of Ukraine.

But the White House’s blanket refusal to honor 71 Democratic requests for documents — revealed in the report — and its blocking of testimony from key White House officials is strengthening the obstruction case and presents an opportunity to make a more complete case to Americans.

Party leaders have warned that they are unwilling to allow the White House to stretch out the impeachment drama for the many months that multiple legal challenges would entail.

There’s a political motivation as well — Pelosi’s desire to quickly send Trump’s fate to the Senate is seen as an effort to pivot the political focus to Democrats’ bid to oust Trump at the ballot box next year that begins with the Iowa caucuses in February.

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Public support for President Donald Trump impeachment has tracked steadily higher over the past few weeks, as a US House of Representatives committee held a series of televised impeachment hearings, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday.

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The next House impeachment witness is the most important so far, Iran News covers the story reported by CNN.

Back to the text messages!

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TEHRAN (Iran News) – Some federal courts dealt blows to US President Donald Trump on Friday just as the limits of his legal strategy to block an impeachment probe into his recent exchange with Ukrainian leader became clear.

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