WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee staff initially drew up 10 articles of impeachment against President Trump last year, alleging a wide range of high crimes and misdemeanors before the case was whittled down to his interactions with Ukraine, according to a book to be published next week.
The staff members, working for Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the committee chairman, drafted a sweeping indictment of Mr. Trump charging him with, among other things, obstructing the Russia investigation, authorizing hush money for women to cover up sexual affairs, illegally diverting money to his border wall and profiting personally from his office.
In the end, House Democratic leaders privately rejected prosecuting the president for those other actions, according to the book, calculating that such an expansive set of accusations would cost them votes even among Democrats by seeming to go too far and thus potentially sink the whole impeachment effort. The internal debate came down to whether to include a third article claiming obstruction of the special counsel investigation but Speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed it.
The decision to pursue a narrower case has long posed one of the most perplexing what-if counterfactuals of the entire impeachment and trial of Mr. Trump: What would have happened if House Democrats had thrown everything they had against the president rather than stick to just his campaign to pressure Ukraine to incriminate his Democratic rivals? Would a broader case have been more compelling as some Democrats argued or be viewed as overreach as the leaders of the impeachment drive concluded?
The new book by Norman L. Eisen, a former White House official and ambassador who served as a lawyer for Mr. Nadler, is the first inside account to emerge from only the third impeachment of a president in American history. Nearly six months after the Senate acquitted Mr. Trump, Mr. Eisen in effect is trying to appeal the verdict to the higher court of public opinion as the election approaches and therefore titled his book, “A Case for the American People.”
Mr. Eisen offers tantalizing details from the committee’s own investigation of the president that did not make it into the final impeachment articles, including testimony reinforcing the suspicion that Mr. Trump had a heads-up from Roger J. Stone Jr. about a pending WikiLeaks release of Democratic emails stolen by Russian agents.
Mr. Eisen likewise elaborates on a previously reported idea to offer a $50 million penthouse to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as part of a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. According to Mr. Eisen, Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, revealed “that he had discussed it with Trump, who liked the idea and thought it was funny,” though it never materialized.
The question of what to include in the case against Mr. Trump is at the heart of Mr. Eisen’s book. As a former ethics counsel to President Barack Obama, Mr. Eisen describes joining the “resistance” to Mr. Trump early in 2017 when he was outraged at the new president’s refusal to cut ties with his company, meaning he would profit from foreign powers that did business with the Trump Organization. Mr. Eisen helped bring lawsuits accusing Mr. Trump of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution before joining Mr. Nadler’s staff early in 2019 hoping to pursue impeachment.
Mr. Eisen discloses that the committee staff members drafted nine articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump in August 2019, even before the Ukraine episode came to light. They would have charged the president with colluding with Russia even though the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reported that he did not find enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy, reasoning that Mr. Trump knowingly benefited from Moscow’s intervention in the 2016 election and that proving a statutory violation was not necessary for impeachment.
They also would have charged Mr. Trump with obstructing Mr. Mueller’s investigation, obstructing congressional investigations, engaging in the hush money scheme carried out by Mr. Cohen, dangling pardons to keep potential witnesses against him quiet, usurping the power of Congress both by spending money on his border wall and by imposing tariffs without authorization, targeting his adversaries with the power of his office and violating the emoluments clause.
The committee staff members, assuming that Mr. Trump would take other objectionable action, then added a placeholder 10th article titled, “The Next High Crime.” Just weeks later, the president’s Ukraine pressure campaign came to light and filled that slot.
As the investigation into the Ukraine matter proceeded, however, House Democratic leaders opted to focus largely on that after concluding that some Democrats in conservative districts would not support a kitchen-sink prosecution.
“I would have loved to have gotten all the articles,” Mr. Eisen said in an interview on Wednesday. “There would have been no benefit to doing it because there was no consensus for doing it.”
Barry Berke, another lawyer for Mr. Nadler, said on Wednesday that there was a serious debate about how broad the articles should be. “I will tell you, it was not an easy question,” he said. “It was more a question of what should be charged than what could be charged.”
By December, after hearings, Mr. Nadler ultimately presented Ms. Pelosi and other leaders with just three articles, one claiming abuse of power by enlisting a foreign power to tarnish Democrats, another claiming obstruction of the House investigation into the matter and a third claiming obstruction of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry.
Ms. Pelosi ruled out the Mueller article, deeming it a bridge too far. But Mr. Nadler fought for permission to insert language into the remaining two articles stating that the actions were part of a broader pattern, in effect referring to the other uncharged offenses.
“We had to simplify it, but we did reference all of it through the pattern language that we got into both of the articles,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “You couldn’t deal with 10 articles. Two were complex enough.”
Ashley Etienne, the speaker’s communications director, said Ms. Pelosi was sensitive to Democrats in conservative districts who were most at risk if the impeachment backfired politically. “It was the front-liners who had a big impact on the speaker,” she said. “Their point from the beginning was: Get rid of Mueller, keep it simple. The strongest case was the Ukraine case.”
By keeping the charges narrowly focused, House leaders won the support of nearly every Democrat for impeachment in December. But they won no Republicans in the House and only one in the Senate, Mitt Romney of Utah. Critics have said Democrats mishandled the matter by focusing too narrowly on Ukraine, which did not resonate enough to create a popular groundswell that would convince Republican senators to remove Mr. Trump from office.
In his own recently published book, John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, confirmed that Mr. Trump directly linked his suspension of military aid for Ukraine to his demand for help tarnishing Democrats — testimony Democrats would have loved to have had. Mr. Bolton did not testify in the House because he said he wanted a judge to rule first on whether he should disobey a White House order to keep silent; he later offered to testify during the Senate trial but Republican senators blocked any witnesses.
Mr. Bolton, in his book, accused House Democrats of “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. He offered other examples of where the president in his view improperly subordinated foreign policy to his own political needs.
In his book, Mr. Eisen reports that House Democrats made a final attempt to get Mr. Bolton’s account before the senators during the last weekend of the trial by inviting him to submit a written affidavit. Mr. Bolton refused, Mr. Eisen writes, insisting he would appear only under Senate subpoena.
In the interview, Mr. Eisen said Mr. Bolton could have changed the dynamics of the trial had he agreed. “That could not only have blown open the door to Bolton testifying but other witnesses,” he said. “When he faults the House for not going broad, he’s faulting himself.”
In the months since the trial, Mr. Eisen said Mr. Trump has hardly restrained himself, purging impeachment witnesses from their jobs, firing inspectors general who angered him, pressuring the Justice Department to drop a case against his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and commuting Mr. Stone’s sentence and sparing him from prison.
“I view the book,” Mr. Eisen said, “as the last chapter both figuratively and literally of the campaign, most fundamentally, to inform the American people about the clear and present danger that Donald Trump represents to each one of us.”
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