Pelosi’s impeachment move takes Dems on leap into dark

Bloomberg

Nancy Pelosi set House Democrats on a course towards an impeachment of President Donald Trump without a clear road map for where it will go and how long it will take — even as new information comes to light.
Democrats accelerated their inquiry, issuing a subpoena and setting plans for witness interviews. But Pelosi, the House speaker, must still settle internal divisions over the scope of the inquiry. Then will come a decision about whether to vote to impeach Trump, a process that could reach a climax amid the 2020 election campaign.
Pelosi said the newly intensified impeachment process — focussed primarily on whether Trump tried to coerce Ukraine’s leader to investigate Joe Biden, one of the president’s chief political rivals — “should move with purpose and expeditiously.”
Yet if history is a guide, the process could take months. A generation after the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Pelosi is grappling
with a different set of circumstances — and mindful of the risk that pursuing Trump poses to Democrats’ hopes of defeating him in the 2020 election and keeping control of the House.

Moving Ahead
Democrats are moving ahead even as more potentially damaging details are revealed, including a Washington Post report that Trump told two senior Russian officials in the Oval Office in May 2017 that he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election, because the US did the same in other countries.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said if true, the incident was “one of the most disturbing things we’ve learned yet.” “The White House should immediately provide the Congressional intelligence committees with all the records of that meeting so we can get to the bottom of it,” Schumer said.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democratic candidate for president, called for legislation to secure US elections. “This is just another example of the President’s crossing the line when it comes to our security versus his own interests,” she said.
Clinton and Andrew Johnson were the only presidents to be impeached by the House, and each was acquitted by the Senate. Richard Nixon resigned after the House Judiciary Committee advanced articles of impeachment.
The Johnson proceedings spanned three months of 1868, and Clinton’s lasted four months. The Nixon inquiry stretched from October 1973 to July 1974.
The Trump and Clinton cases have an interesting parallel: both came after lengthy probes by specially appointed counsel charged with looking into a politically sensitive episode. But the trigger for the impeachment inquiry in both cases sprang from a different matter.
Clinton was investigated by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr who was examining an Arkansas real estate deal known as Whitewater.