House Intel writes its report

House Democrats on Tuesday asserted that President Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to help him in the 2020 presidential election, releasing a 300-page impeachment report that found that Mr. Trump “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States.”

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They left it to another committee to decide whether to formally recommend Mr. Trump’s impeachment and removal, but the report laid out in searing fashion what are all but certain to be the grounds on which the House moves to impeach the president.

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“The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, uncovered a monthslong effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election,” said the report, released ahead of a vote on Tuesday evening by the Intelligence Committee to formally approve it.

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The report also lays out what it calls an “unprecedented campaign of obstruction of this impeachment inquiry” by Mr. Trump, based on his refusal to release documents from agencies including the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House budget office, and his directive that potential witnesses not cooperate.

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The report does indicate that Democrats collected more raw evidence than previously known, including call records produced by AT&T and Verizon showing a series of phone calls between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and his associates and allies of the president at high levels of government.

One burst of calls that Democrats highlighted came as Mr. Giuliani was executing a smear campaign against the ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, and pressing Ukraine to announce investigations that could benefit Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani spoke to Lev Parnas, his business partner who was charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan in a related scheme; Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee; Kash Patel, a former Nunes aide who works on the National Security Council; as well as unmarked numbers at the White House and its budget office.

  NYT

And what was the White House response to the report? Let's hear from Stephanie Grisham...

“Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” Ms. Grisham said in a statement. “This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations. Chairman Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”

I guess she didn't watch the hearings.

Both parties are poised for a fierce, partisan debate in the House Judiciary Committee over whether to charge the president with high crimes and misdemeanors, the Constitution’s threshold for removal, and a likely partisan vote by the House to do so before Christmas.

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Anticipating the split, Mr. Schiff used the report to lament the disconnect between the parties and warn that it amounted to precisely the kind of intensive polarization that worried the framers of the Constitution.

“Today, we may be witnessing a collision between the power of a remedy meant to curb presidential misconduct and the power of faction determined to defend against the use of that remedy on a president of the same party,” Mr. Schiff wrote. “But perhaps even more corrosive to our democratic system of governance, the president and his allies are making a comprehensive attack on the very idea of fact and truth.”

He added, “How can a democracy survive without acceptance of a common set of experiences?”

It might well not survive.