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Washington (CNN) - After a week of lashes, the United States faces the reality of a new and long national nightmare about a potentially corrupt presidency.
Forty-five years after Watergate, 20 years after Bill Clinton's shame, the political trial mechanism is coming alive again in Washington. It is likely that the attempt by the Democrats to expel the defiant President Donald Trump, given the already very bitter divisions, will pour even more poison into the political soul of the nation than those two previous dramas of political judgment.
- What you should know about the informant's complaint and the investigation for a political trial against Trump
Unlike the complicated and confusing image of murky dealings with the Russians and the possible obstruction drawn by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, the pending questions in the new confrontation are clear, a factor that adds to the political vulnerability of the president.
Did Trump abuse his power by seizing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from taxpayers to pressure a foreign country in order to harm a political opponent? And then the White House made an effort to hide it?
"The president of the United States has betrayed his oath, betrayed his oath to defend our national security and his oath to defend our constitution," the president of the House of Representatives Intelligence Commission, Adam Schiff, said Thursday.
An informant's complaint against Trump regarding his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “road map,” said Schiff. The accusations of disguise in the document put several key Trump allies to scrutiny, such as lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the secretary of Justice William Barr, and alludes to other possible instances in which the records were kept secret for political purposes.
So far, 219 House Democrats - more than half of the 435 members - have publicly declared their support for political trial procedures, according to the CNN count.
The character of the president's Republican defense is also clear. Lawmakers and supporters of the Republican Party are already trying to discredit what appears to be strong documentary evidence of Trump's pressure on Zelensky. And the White House frames the accusation as another major attack by the Democrats against Trump, a president who, they say, was illegitimate since his 2016 victory.
“What these boys are doing, what the Democrats are doing to this country is a disgrace, and should not be allowed. There should be a way to stop it, ”Trump said, about the constitutional process of checks and balances, in a fierce statement about the airport runway after returning from New York on Thursday.
Washington was transformed in a matter of days
On Monday, Washington showed up for work hoping that most of the drama of the week would take place around Trump at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. However, apparently in the blink of an eye, life changed profoundly for the president, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and Senate Republicans who could save the commander in chief.
- The key part of the informant's complaint that represents the biggest threat to Trump
In the coming weeks, the story of what happened in Trump's talks with his Ukrainian counterpart and if he broke the law and did not comply with the most basic constitutional principles will be distorted in a political maelstrom.
But after a week of leaks, clashes between Trump and the House of Representatives president, Nancy Pelosi, successful revelations and key character bets, the facts of the case are beginning to emerge.
Trump is accused of illegally using $ 400 million in military aid to force a vulnerable Ukraine, fighting for its survival against Vladimir Putin's Russia, to investigate its potential rival in 2020, Joe Biden.
The president seemed to believe he could get rid of on Wednesday by publishing an approximate transcript of the call with Zelensky. But the measure made everything worse. Although the Republicans insisted that there was no quid pro quo, the document showed Trump supporting himself in Zelensky and asking for a "favor."
In 2016, Trump was accused of benefiting knowingly from a Russian electoral intrusion plan. If the latest accusations are confirmed, he would have taken the 2020 election interference in his own hands.
The case clouded considerably with the publication, on Thursday, of a report of whistleblowers that the White House had tried to suppress to contain the worst crisis of its presidency.
The still unknown person who wrote the report accused the president of "using the power of his office to request interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US elections."
If that action had occurred, it would be the closest thing to a charge of presidential abuse of power, a crime that can potentially lead to a political trial.
In another detail that will have far-reaching implications, the complainant alleged that the White House tried to cover up evidence of Trump's behavior.
The report says that some officials were asked to remove the transcript of Trump's conversation with Zelensky from the computer system in which it was stored and take it to another classified system used for more confidential national security information.
The measure potentially corrupted a repository that is supposed to be used only for the nation's most sensitive secrets with material protected for a purely political purpose.
"This is a cover-up," said Pelosi.
A road map
Democrats believe they now have a “road map” for the political trial process announced by Pelosi on Wednesday after months of trying to curb the liberal tide.
- What the complaint about Trump, Ukraine, the 2020 elections and others reveals
Their long-standing reluctance to go this far can strengthen the Democratic hand, since they can now argue that new evidence of illegality, and not the disputed count of events provided by Mueller, forced their actions.
Pelosi on Thursday gave the Schiff Intelligence Commission the leading role in the political trial investigation.
Schiff's first measure was to release the report of informants just before a hearing with the interim director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, whom the Democrats accused of not wanting to deliver the congressional complaint.
The reporting of informants, Schiff said, would provide a "road map" for the commission's attempt to interview witnesses and make requests for documents on the matter.
During the hearing, Maguire, a former commander of the SEALs, said that both the complainant and the inspector general of the intelligence community, who considered the complaint "urgent and credible," had followed the law at all times.
The White House, initially overwhelmed by the sudden turn of events, is preparing a scorched earth defense.
"We see many Democrats who have spent the past two and a half years on unsubstantiated accusations and are still trying to nullify the will of the American people in the last presidential elections," Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday.
Later, it was learned that Trump directly attacked the whistleblower with a hint of veiled violence while addressing US diplomats at the United Nations.
“I want to know who the person is, who is the person who gave the information to the complainant? Because that's close to a spy, ”Trump said, according to an audio recording published by the Los Angeles Times. “Do you know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? True? Spies and betrayal, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now. ”
Biden enters the contest
Biden responded to the president with his most combative comments in a saga that plays with the central theme of his campaign that Trump is not fit for office.
- The Democrats go for the political trial and Trump charges against them
But Trump's accusations that Biden and his son Hunter are guilty of corruption in Ukraine and China - for which there is no evidence - also threaten to emerge as a distraction for the former vice president.
At a fundraising event in California, Biden said Trump was trying to "kidnap the election."
"He would like to get foreign help to win the election," Biden said.
But Texas Republican Rep. Mike Conaway argued that the president had every right to ask a foreign counterpart to investigate corruption, borrowing the White House explanation for the call between Zelensky and the US leader.
"Having a president ask another president to help enforce the laws in alleged irregularities," said Conaway, "is very appropriate."
CNN's Manu Raju contributed to this story.
Political judgment
