constitutional grounds. but it s the judiciary committee, which has traditionally been the most partisan committee in congress. members going after each other as much as they might be going after the constitutional basis for this report. and then, oh by the way, we re going to have rolling deadlines all week long. we could potentially have additional hearings announced next week. we ve got this deadline on friday for the president and his attorneys to decide if they want to participate in the inquiry at all. so we re up against an end of the year deadline. it isn t a real deadline but for political purposes, it s when democrats want to be done. and they are trying to get a lot of things done in a very short period of time. garrett, what let s talk about the deadline for the the righting of the articles of impeachment. is there some sense it s already done? well, look. it s hard to say exactly. but we know is that these things will probably you know, the outlines for the artic
quid pro quo. the idea that the money was released because they knew there was an investigation going to be happening. right. and in some ways there was already evidence of this. we know that the democrats had announced an investigation of ukraine matters on september 9th, two days before the aid gets released, but this tells you even more that the president and his team was aware at least in a broad way of what the whistle-blower had concerns about. and so we now know a new element of the time line just gets introduced, usually these things are well-settled by the time utalk about drafting articles of impeachment. so very fast moving situation. let s talk about the articles of impeachment. something you wrote tonight two articles are virtually guaranteed to show up as features of impeachment against the president but that democrats are divided on whether to involve matters related to russia and the mueller investigation into this. tell me a bit about the dispute. right, so the u
articles of impeachment. so, a very fast-moving situation. let s talk about the articles of impeachment. something you wrote tonight is that two articles of impeachment are virtually guaranteed to show up as features of the impeachment against the president. but that democrats are divided on whether to involve matters related to russia and the mueller investigation into this. tell me a bit about the dispute. right, so the ukraine investigation clearly honed in on the abuse of power argument. trump pressured a foreign government to help his own political prospects and obstruction. a lot of witnesses were blocked from coming. congress still hasn t had access to some of the top witnesses they d like to see. the mueller report, which many people thought would initially be the basis for any impeachment proceedings we saw, has kind of fallen by the wayside in this discussion, except that we now have this ruling in the mcgahn case, mueller s star wit uns, former white house counsel don mc
hearsay rule that are played every day in courtrooms and could play in an impeachment proceeding where the fact that you don t have the direct conversation but the circumstances create the validity of the testimony, it s just as strong as direct conversations. what do you think? i think you ll continually hear that theme by republicans. i think they ll continually push democrats to show evidence of the president actually saying i wanted this bribery screen to go through. and i think you ll hear that. the other thing you ll hear from republicans is the inherent power argument that you may think that this effort was corrupt but the president has the inherent power to go after corruption in ukraine or anywhere else if he thinks there s corruption. it s a subjective decision as to whether you think it s corrupt or legitimate. i think you ll hear the inherent argument as well. inherent power argument as well. i don t think either of these arguments are very strong, but, you know, i thin
but it the start i would like to focus on the substance of this. this is impeachment in search of a crime. much of what the discussion is by the democratic party doesn t ever work its way around to high crimes and misdemeanors, treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors, it starts with abuse of power argument. the difference between this one and 1998 is you didn t have to search far to be able to understand in connection with the clinton impeachment there were crimes that were set forth in the impeachment referral and no one was left to wonder what those crimes were, perjury and instruction of justice. this one it is the opposite. they have yet to establish or substantiate how this would rise to the level of bribery or extortion or campaign-finance violation of law, they are avoiding the issue because that is not what they want to talk about. it is abuse of power. that is another way of saying