the most egregious of all of the charges in the articles of impeachment, and that is that the president of the united states withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from an ally at war to help secure that nation s help to cheat in the next election. now, let me make one other point, though, very clear. we already have testimony on this key pernicious charge against the president. and that testimony has been consistent and uniform and uncontested. when the president s counsel says, as they did on the senate floor, that there is no direct evidence the president ever told someone he was conditioning the aid on these investigations, that s just not correct. he told mick mulvaney and mick mulvaney admitted it publicly, and that was part of the reason they held up the money.
the security assistance flowed and the presidential meeting took place all without any announcement of investigations, and president trump has enhanced america s support for ukraine in his three years in office. these facts all require that the first article of impeachment fail. you have already heard and will continue to hear from my colleagues on why the second article must fail. once again, this is the case that the house managers chose to bring. this is the evidence they brought before the senate. the very heavy burden of proof rests with them. they say their case is overwhelming and uncontested. it is not. they say they have proven each of the articles against
have said this for three years, the big lie we re hearing perpetrated tonight is one the end justifies the means, the lie the sham impeachment is okay because the threat is so real and so urgent and so imminent. the big lies that political expediency is honorable and justifiable, and history has shown that to be untrue and dangerous. the big lie is that adam schiff had gained evidence in plain sight he said of president trump colluding with russia and special counsel mueller s report debunked that lie, but it continues to spread like a cancer every time we meet. the big lie is that the evidence of the impeachment is overwhelming and uncontested, the facts are undisputed. the very fact that people in this committee dispute the facts make them disputed facts, not undisputed facts. the problem that we re seeing here is even when you get to the ar articles themselves, abuse of power when you compare them to history, i m glad the chairman
but one of the things that, you know, for all the parallels to other impeachment proceedings, right, for all the ways this sort of tracks, the process, at least, for how they approached the nixon impeachment and the clinton impeachment, there is something that s unusual, that is truly novel with the impeachment we have living through right now, which is the president is being impeached, but the investigation into him is ongoing, right? they re impeaching him because they know the basics of what he did to ukraine, the basic facts aren t in dispute. the evident is basically unconte uncontested. the president abandoned u.s. policy towards ukraine, not because he wanted some new u.s. policy, but because he wanted them to do a domestic political errand for him. he pressured ukraine into providing him domestic political favors and he staked a white house meeting for their president and hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid as sort of additional leverage behind that demand. that s a
meeting as additional leverage, additional pressure behind that demand. that s all uncontested. they admit that is what they did. as for the second article of impeachment, the obstruction one, it s also uncontested. all sides agree that president trump has flat out and completely refused to acknowledge the constitutional authority of the house to conduct an impeachment. and he s refused flat out to cooperate with it or allow any witness testimony like even other impeached presidents have. they are impeaching him on those two articles for this narrow scope of his behavior that is factually uncontested to and admitted to by the president himself. there are these two articles he admits i did it, that s what they re impeaching him on. but in a way that is novel, unpres dnlted, in a way we re