And on the first day, Democrats unleashed the flood.
One by one, the seven House impeachment prosecutors seeking President Donald Trump’s removal from office reconstructed a case against the president so dense — at times, head-scratchingly complex — that it was hard for senators new to the material to keep up.
After a lofty introduction by the House’s lead manager, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Democrats shed any pretense of offering a streamlined, made-for-TV version of events meant to captivate the Senate or the nation. For much of the day, they cast aside any attempt to make a narrowly tailored case to Republicans that they should support calls for additional witnesses.
Instead, they decided to hammer senators with everything they had: an all-day torrent of intricate information, peppered with screenshots of deposition transcripts, emails, text messages and about 50 video clips — nearly three times more than House Republicans used during the entirety of their arguments in the 1999 Clinton trial.
It was a presentation that seemed designed to demonstrate what Democrats have long professed: that the facts of the Ukraine scandal threatening Trump’s presidency are so overwhelming as to be almost infallible. As Republicans harangued Democrats for failing to “do their homework,” the House managers were intent to emphasize just how much “homework” they did.
“We have some very long days yet to come,” Schiff warned the Senate as he kicked off the House’s arguments on Wednesday. He added, “Over the coming days, we will present to you and to the American people the extensive evidence collected in the House's inquiry into the president’s abuse of power, overwhelming evidence ... despite his unprecedented obstruction into that misconduct.”
What followed was a painstaking chronology of Democrats’ case that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals and obstructed Congress' investigation of the alleged scheme.
The Democrats included lengthy reconstructions of the April ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump's associates viewed as an obstacle in their quest to launch the investigations. They picked apart Trump’s decision in May to cancel Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Ukraine, which Ukraine had sought as an important gesture of support.
The House lawmakers also dissected a two-week stretch in July during which administration officials agonized over Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine amid his call for investigations. And they recounted at length the turmoil this hold on aid provoked in the diplomatic corps in August and September.
To one Senate Republican, the firehose of evidence was an education in itself, for him and his colleagues.
“Nine out of 10 senators will tell you they haven’t read a full transcript of the proceedings in the House,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) quipped. “And the 10th senator who says he has is lying.”
Some Republicans even sounded envious of the Democrats’ use of multimedia during the trial and wished Trump’s defense team would follow suit. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump’s top defenders, said Democrats have been presenting their case to the public like it's "cable news" — but lamented that the defense team’s case presented more like “an 8th grade book report.”
“Actually, no, I take that back,” he added, because an 8th grader would actually know how to use PowerPoint and iPads.
But the strategy to deluge the Senate also carries significant risks as the House managers tried to hammer home somewhat contradictory messages: their case is “overwhelming,” but at the same time it's incomplete without calling new witnesses and subpoenaing documents they say are necessary for a fuller understanding of Trump’s conduct.
It is a tightrope that Democrats have walked for more than a month, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi held the impeachment articles back from the Senate in an attempt to build pressure for new witness testimony and document production in the Senate. It is also one that Trump’s congressional allies have tried to highlight — contending that House Democrats simply want the Senate to reopen a rushed and incomplete investigation.
“The Senate is not an investigative body. We are not here to open up new lines of investigation, chase down things that the House didn’t do,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a Trump ally. “The House had the opportunity to pursue these issues. They did not take that opportunity in most cases. And now they want the Senate to effectively do their work.”
Democrats saw the risks of their plan in real time: the limits of senators’ attention spans. While Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) recounted some of the national security implications of the president’s alleged actions, he paused to point out that a slew of senators had left their seats and were milling about the back of the chamber. Maybe they should take a break, he suggested to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, as he presided over the trial.
The House's case might only get denser from here. When the trial resumes on Thursday, the House managers are expected to use their second of three days to outline the constitutional framework for impeachment and why they believe Trump’s alleged misconduct meets the threshold for removal from office.
"If impeachment and removal cannot hold him accountable," Schiff said Wednesday afternoon, "then he truly is above the law."
Melanie Zanona and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.
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