His eventually obituary, that is how we wrap up our wednesday night broadcast. Thank you so very much for being here with us. Good night from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. It is wednesday, the 18th Of December in the year 2019 and President Donald Trump is impeached. The vote in the House Of Representatives tonight to impeach the president was not close. It was 230 to 197 on the first article, which was abuse of power. One democrat voted present. On the second article, Obstruction Of Congress, it was a vote of 229198, again, with one vote present. These were not slim margins. The successful vote to impeach the president tonight, of course, does not remove him from office. The decision of whether or not to remove him from office will now be made in the United States senate, where hell be put on trial in a proceeding overseen
by the Chief Justice of the United States supreme court. Were talking about that as if it is a forgone conclusion, as if thats the next obvious thing
going to be handled in the senate will be important breaking news. so we re waiting on that. conscious of the fact that these proceedings have moved very quickly and have changed sort of radically in terms of outlook and political expectation since this impeachment scandal started. it started very recently. september 13th, late at night on a friday night when this ball first started rolling downhill, it was a very sharply worded, very unusual late night letter from the chairman of the intelligence committee, congressman adam schiff. i remember it was late on friday night. i was on the air live until 10:00 that night. this letter did not surface until after i was already off the air. it was addressed to joseph mcgwire and it was blunt dear director mcgwire no later than december 2, 2019 the intelligence committee should have received by you as required by law a disclosure regarding
dear director maguire, no later than december 2nd, 2019, the intelligence committee should have received by you as required by law a disclosure regarding abuse, violation of law or executive order. the committee has not received this disclosure in violation of the law. the chairman ripped the director of national intelligence up and down at that point in his letter for bottling up this whistle-blower complaint and not allowing anybody to see it. the chairman saying in that letter, september 13th, quote, you do not possess the authority to withhold from the committee a whistle-blower disclosure from within the intelligence committee that is intended for congress. schiff then went onto dismiss all the excuses he has heard from the dni. i m going to step away from this for a second, talking about the origins of the scandal, because speaker pelosi and the house leadership are speaking now. we ll get back to this in a moment. stay with us. december 18th, a great day for the constitution o