Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the 19th District Democrat and member of the House Judiciary Committee, concluded her question period at the Dec. 9 impeachment hearing with her first call for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Lofgren had for months held off on her support of even an impeachment inquiry until after the Ukrainian revelations, when she joined the House majority Oct. 31 to vote in favor of the inquiry. At the Judiciary Committee’s second day of hearings Dec. 9, Lofgren was the first committee member to ask questions after Chair Jerry Nadler and Ranking GOP Rep. Doug Collins.
Almost as an afterthought, Lofgren said that the impeachment of President Bill Clinton “took 73 days. We’re here on the 76th day. We need to proceed.”
She prefaced that comment by stating “I’ve made it clear throughout this investigation that I didn’t want to be part of a third impeachment inquiry—but the direct evidence is very damning.”
“And the President hasn’t offered any evidence to the contrary,” she said. “We’ve asked, we’ve subpoenaed, we’ve invited the President, and nothing has come forward, if he had evidence of his innocence.”
She thanked Daniel Goldman, attorney and director of investigations for the House Intelligence Committee who was testifying before her committee, “for your hard work.”
Lofgren’s congressional district includes Morgan Hill, San Martin and half of Gilroy.
In her brief questioning of Goldman, Lofgren, a Santa Clara University Law School graduate, anticipated the attorney’s answers, at one point saying “Correct” in response.
The 12-term member of Congress, who is seeking reelection in 2020, asked Goldman, “You’re an experienced former prosecutor. Is it common to announce an investigation but not actually conduct the investigation?”
Goldman responded, “No, usually it works in the reverse: The testimony is why the closed depositions in our investigation were so important. Whatever the President claims about his desire to root out corruption, even if you assume that these investigations are for that purpose, as he has stated, it undermines that because he doesn’t actually care if the investigations are done.”
“Even if you assume—which I don’t think the evidence supports—that it’s corruption, then he’s still not doing the corruption investigation,” Goldman continued. “And the second is, he just wanted the public announcement. The private conversation was not enough. And that’s an indication that he wanted the political benefit of it.”
Lofgren then summarized: “[The President] used a foreign government to do his bidding, and he used military aid to get the job done. Now this aid was approved by Congress, it was appropriated on a bipartisan basis. And Republicans are saying that because the aid was released, that there was not a problem.”
“Now, Mr. Goldman, isn’t it true that the aid was released only after the President got caught, and only after Congress learned of the scheme to make this life-or-death aid conditional on this announcement of an investigation of his political rival?”
Goldman replied, “There were several things that made the President realize that this was coming to a head and could not be concealed. The whistleblower complaint was circulating around the White House, the Congressional committees announced their own investigation and then perhaps the Washington Post op-ed on Sept. 5 linking the two, and then the Inspector General notified the committee that there was this whistleblower complaint that was being withheld by the Trump Administration.”
The Judiciary Committee was expected to report out its recommended Articles of Impeachment as early as Dec. 10, with a House vote coming as early as next week.
On her Congressional website, Lofgren posted a link to a 27-page report, “Constitutional Grounds for Impeachment, Report by the Staff of the Impeachment Inquiry,” by the House Judiciary Committee in the 93rd Congress, February 1974.
Lofgren is the only member of Congress who has worked on both the Nixon impeachment—as a Santa Clara University law student—and the Clinton impeachment—as a member of Congress and the House Judiciary Committee.
