Dec. 8 (UPI) — House judiciary committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said Sunday that he expects his panel will present articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump this week.
Nadler, D-N.Y., appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press a day before his committee is set to hear from members of the House intelligence committee about the findings of their investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden, to say he had confidence the impeachment proceedings against the president would move forward.
“We’ll bring articles of impeachment presumably before the committee at some point later in the week,” he said.
Ahead of Monday’s hearing, Trump accused House Democrats of attempting to change the impeachment guidelines.
“Less than 48 hours before start of the Impeachment Hearing Hoax, on Monday, the No Due Process, Do Nothing Democrats are, believe it or not, changing the Impeachment Guidelines because the facts are not on their side,” he wrote on Twitter. “When you can’t win the game, change the rules!”
On Saturday, the House judiciary committee released a report Saturday outlining historical arguments for impeachment of the president that didn’t take a position on whether Trump should be impeached but came two days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked for articles of impeachment to be drawn up.
Nadler said the committee would make decisions about what exactly to include in the articles of impeachment after Monday’s meeting, telling CNN’s State of the Union Congress must still consider several factors before taking that step.
“What is the level of proof for the various allegations? How do they relate together? What is the level of support in our caucus and in the Hosue for them? What might we persuade the Senate of — all of these things have to be taken into account, realizing again that the central allegation, it’s all part of a pattern,” he said.
In addition, Nadler said the committee would consider concerns about whether the articles of impeachment should focus on whether Trump withheld military funding from Ukraine to prompt an investigation into Biden and his son or if it should include former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into collusion with Russia and potential obstruction of justice by Trump and his campaign team.
“We also have to consider the fact that we have to call the president for his violations of the constitution and the considerable risk he poses to the next election,” Nadler said.
Also on NBC, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, decried the impeachment proceedings as an obfuscation of the fact that Trump has instituted policies on Russia that he described as tougher “by orders of magnitude” than former President Barack Obama’s.
“This is a kangaroo court in the House. They’re going to impeach, not because they have the evidence but because they hate the president,” Cruz said of House Democrats. “But it’s going to go to the Senate, it’s going to go nowhere and I think the American people know this is a waste of time.”
When asked if he was willing to impeach Trump with no votes from Republicans, Nadler said the House would impeach Trump on “adequate, urgent grounds to defend our democratic republic,” stating earlier that if the Democratic case was presented to a jury it would produce “a guilty verdict in about three minutes flat.”
“There is considerable direct evidence,” Nadler said. “It ill behooves a president or his partisans to say you don’t have enough direct evidence when the reason we don’t have even more evidence is the president has ordered everybody in the executive branch not to cooperate with Congress in the impeachment inquiry.”
