Now that an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump's actions is formally underway, House Democrats face a genuine dilemma in determining how to proceed. Trump has been accused in the press and by government investigators of a long list of criminal acts, from tax evasion to campaign finance violations to multiple sexual assaults, but it is the conclusions of the special counsel's investigation of Russian election interference that have been seen as the most urgent concerns. Robert Mueller and his staff laid out a clear pattern of obstruction of justice in Trump's efforts to undermine the Russia probe and deflect the investigation of his own senior staff.
But Trump's request for an election favor from the president of Ukraine, as Trump withheld, without explanation, critical military aid from the U.S. ally, is a plain and uncomplicated abuse of his office. Soliciting foreign government assistance in a U.S. election is a crime. Withholding military aid to an ally as means of pressuring for that favor is a betrayal of the country. The impeachable offense is both in-your-face overt and simple to understand, and if impeaching Trump for that sole conversation quickly removes him from office and blocks him from additional criminal acts, it is the duty of every lawmaker to vote to do so.
So what happens to the rest of it? Does Trump simply walk away, free and clear, from what Robert Mueller's documents repeatedly suggested were prosecutable criminal acts, if he had not been specifically barred from prosecuting them? From the tax frauds and innumerable petty schemes to funnel government cash into his personal business ventures? From his participation as Individual 1 in a campaign-trail hush money payment that landed his personal lawyer in prison?
Politico is reporting on the internal debate among House Democrats and committees over what happens next. After stalling impeachment efforts interminably until an easy-enough-to-explain crime landed in their laps, House leaders now seem intent on speeding through the process, using the Ukrainian request as the primary, if not sole, impeachment focus. This would allow the House to present an uncomplicated public case: No matter what else Trump might have done, this act was a betrayal of his oath and of the nation. He's got to go, it is obvious that he has got to go, and we'll sort out the rest of the damage later.
On the other hand, it is not clear that even the so-called Ukraine scandal is as uncomplicated as we first thought. What was first thought to be a straightforward and criminal request by Trump seeking foreign government help in securing dirt against an election opponent now seems to be a single thread of a much larger scheme by Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Trump's Cohnesque Attorney General William Barr, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to seek out foreign assistance in supporting Trump's continued, obsessive insistence that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin was framed by the U.S. intelligence community and is in fact innocent—that some other entity, not Putin's government, was behind the 2016 election hacks.
Trump in fact asked the Ukrainian president to look into this precise conspiracy theory during the now-infamous call; we now know that Barr has been the point person behind multiple other attempts to solicit similar foreign cooperation.
That not only makes the Ukrainian phone call a narrow attempt to solicit Biden "dirt," but also directly ties it to the pattern of obstruction outlined at length in Mueller's final report. Administration efforts to undermine the U.S. investigation of Russian election interference have not ended; in fact, they appear to have escalated dramatically after Mueller ended his work. And two Cabinet officials, Barr and Pompeo, have been spearheading the efforts to discredit U.S. intelligence in favor of Trump's pro-Russia counterclaims.
All of this, then, is about to explode into an enormous mess.
The danger, as Democrats see it, is falling into what is now seen as the Mueller trap: creating a list of Trump's crimes that may be compelling to lawyers, but would be baffling and opaque to the general public. A laundry list of impeachment charges, bringing in hush money payments, emoluments, tax fraud, and the rest would result in Republican claims that Trump opponents were throwing every scandal to the Senate in the hopes that just one of them would stick, and there seems little doubt that Republican senators do not give a damn about any of those things. The Ukrainian call, though, they are worried about. It is not defensible without dishonesty. It is a high crime that even Mitch McConnell cannot easily brush away.
Mueller's obstruction charges fall into an uncomfortable zone between the two. They tie directly into Trump's Ukrainian demands, and represent a long pattern of misuse of the office. That is where the majority of the House Democrats' debate seems to currently be centered.
The best answer is not immediately clear. A rapid impeachment is essential for the safety of the nation; a thorough accounting of the Trump administration's efforts to subvert the rule of law not once, not twice, but many times, aggressively and using multiple federal agencies, is similarly critical. The Republican Senate will have a more difficult time papering over Trump's misuse of his office if the impeachment charges are narrow and direct; this, though, frees those Republicans from a vote to endorse or reject Trump's equally repulsive obstructions.
It may be sufficient to impeach Trump for the most obvious crime, and prosecute him for the rest. The Constitution does not allow presidential pardons in cases of impeachment; Trump and Pence cannot rely on Oval Office powers to immunize Barr, Pompeo, and other co-conspirators. But it is risky. It is risky in the extreme, and Republican insistence that Dear Leader be allowed to commit illegal acts without repercussion, because Reasons, still threatens to make moot every effort to retrieve the rule of law before it is too late.