Just after 9 a.m. on Thursday morning, Nancy Pelosi made it official: the House of Representatives will vote to impeach President Trump. On Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee had released its report on Trump’s Ukraine affair, calling it a “scheme” to abuse the powers of his office and subvert U.S. foreign policy for his own political benefit. On Wednesday, Pelosi had signalled where she was going with the investigation, calling Trump “a threat to democracy” and convening a private caucus of her members to check their political will for moving ahead. “Are you ready?” she asked. A chorus of “yeses” answered. Republicans had been trying to plant the idea with reporters that some Democrats were getting cold feet—that perhaps Pelosi would not proceed after all, or would offer a censure resolution as an alternative to going ahead with an attempt to remove Trump from office which appeared all but doomed to fail in the Republican-majority Senate.
The New Yorker: Adam Schiff on Donald Trump, impeachment, and what’s next
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff(C), D-CA, remarks as Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC Nov. 19, 2019, during a public impeachment hearing of President Donald Trump's efforts to tie US aid for Ukraine to investigations of his political opponents.
