Flurry of House Dems back impeachment inquiry, as caucus plans to discuss Ukraine whistleblower matter

Just a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strongly suggested she was now warming to the idea of impeaching President Trump, a slew of key swing-district Democrats late Monday threw their support en masse behind opening a formal impeachment inquiry.

The rapid-fire declarations by the influential Democrats, after seemingly months of teetering on the brink, came as leaders of the House Democrats scheduled a meeting for Tuesday afternoon on how to handle an explosive whistleblower complaint concerning the president’s phone call with the Ukrainian president this past summer.

“The horse is out of the barn,” said former Hillary Clinton pollster and strategist Geoff Garin. “Saddle up.”

Speaking to Fox News, a House Democratic leadership aide indicated that trade — not condemning the president — would headline Democrats’ agenda at a caucus meeting Wednesday. But a separate meeting on Tuesday to specifically discuss the Ukraine matter has been scheduled, Fox News was told.

“The dominant focus of the caucus on Wednesday is trade,” the aide told Fox News. “A second caucus has been added to ensure adequate time for member discussion on the whistleblower matter and a number of other pressing matters on Tuesday afternoon.”

Seven centrist Democratic freshmen lawmakers who served in the military and national security announced in an op-ed late Monday that if Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate rival Joe Biden for political benefit, it’s impeachable. The lawmakers — Reps. Gil Cisneros of California, Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Elaine Luria of Virginia, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia — come largely from swing districts where Trump is popular but voters split.

The Democrats wrote in The Washington Post they “do not arrive at this conclusion lightly.”

“The horse is out of the barn. Saddle up.”

— Geoff Garin

Later in the night, Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz and Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell also threw their support behind an impeachment inquiry.

“On behalf of the people who elected us, we must formalize and accelerate the impeachment process so that Congress, by exercising its responsibility under Article 1 of the Constitution, can provide some measure of accountability,” Schatz said in a statement.

The flurry of moves brings to 154 the number of House Democrats who have signaled strong support for possible impeachment proceedings. (235 Democrats and 198 Republicans are in the House, with one independent — and a majority would be required to successfully impeach the president. An unlikely two-thirds vote in the GOP-controlled Senate would be needed to convict and remove the president.)

Democrats have presented conflicting views, in court and in public, as to whether impeachment proceedings are already in progress. The renewed push on Monday could galvanize remaining Democrats to openly call their efforts an impeachment probe.

Meanwhile, a report in Politico late Monday suggested that Democrats may vote on a resolution to condemn Trump for allegedly pressuring Ukraine’s leadership to investigate possible corruption by Joe Biden’s son Hunter relating to his business dealings in the country.

And The Washington Post reported in the evening that Pelosi was sounding out members of the Democratic caucus to see if the time has come to impeach the president.

However, earlier Monday, a person familiar with the situation told Fox News that the whistleblower in question did not have “firsthand knowledge” of Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The source said that it was made clear in the complaint itself that the whistleblower did not have direct knowledge of the July phone call.

Fox News has learned that typically, multiple U.S. officials would be on such calls with the president, but this would indicate the whistleblower was not one of those people. It’s unclear if the individual read a transcript of the call, heard about it in conversation, or learned of it another way.

SOURCE TO FOX NEWS: WHISTLEBLOWER HAD NO FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE OF TRUMP CALL

Nevertheless, Democrats have pressed forward on the issue, even as it risked backfiring by exposing potential wrongdoing by the former vice president.

“The Senate Republican ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ attitude is unacceptable and must change,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Senate floor Monday. “This again is an issue of solemn obligation. There is no wiggle room here, none.”

The New York Democrat earlier in the day wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asking him to issue a subpoena and hold hearings over the complaint.

Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine were under scrutiny at the same time his father, as vice president, has admitted pressuring the country to fire its top prosecutor. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

In a floor speech Monday afternoon, the Kentucky Republican rebuffed those calls from Democrats, saying the Senate Intelligence Committee has been following an established process and was working to hear from the intelligence community’s inspector general this week.

“It is regrettable that House Intelligence Committee Chairman [Adam] Schiff and Sen. Schumer have chosen to politicize the issue,” McConnell said, calling for looking into the matter in an “appropriate, deliberate bipartisan manner.”

At least one Republican lawmaker has also called for the release of the transcript of Trump’s call.

“At this stage, given the seriousness of the allegations, it’s very important that the transcript and potentially as well the whistleblower come forward,” said Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, an occasional Trump critic and onetime presidential rival.

UKRAINE CONTROVERSY BOILS OVER ON SENATE FLOOR

Meanwhile, top Republicans including California Rep. Devin Nunes predicted that the gambit would backfire for Democrats. Late Sunday evening, Trump sounded a similar note, tweeting the “real story” was that “Sleepy Joe Biden” had “forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by the threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine.”

Indeed, the whistleblower’s allegation could prompt scrutiny of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. The former vice president has explained on camera that in March 2016, he privately threatened then-President Petro Poroshenko that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine if its top prosecutor was not fired.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion,’” Biden recounted telling Poroshenko at a Council on Foreign Relations event. “I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”

“Well, son of a b—h, he got fired,” Biden continued, after assuring Poroshenko that Obama knew about the arrangement. “And, they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

It remained unclear if this was directly tied to the prosecutor’s probe into the company linked to Hunter Biden, as other countries reportedly wanted the prosecutor out as well.

At the same time, Trump acknowledged Sunday that he had communicated with Zelensky about Biden, and that the conversation concerned “the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”

The president and top officials maintained Sunday that nothing inappropriate occurred on the call.

The whistleblower drama began after The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Trump repeatedly had asked Zelenskiy to investigate Hunter Biden, who had a key role in a natural gas firm that a Ukrainian prosecutor had been investigating as part of a corruption probe.

Trump’s conversation came as his administration was holding up $250 million in military aid for Ukraine, money that the White House later released. The president has said he wanted European countries to pay more for their own defense, and denied delaying any military aid funding.

At a conference two years after he left office, Joe Biden openly bragged about successfully pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor when he was vice president.

Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire is expected to testify before the House Intelligence Committee at an open hearing on Thursday. Democrats have sought the full whistleblower complaint and testimony from the whistleblower.

“If the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation,” Pelosi, D-Calif., warned Sunday. “Thank you for your patriotism.”

Pelosi went on: “We must be sure that the President and his Administration are always conducting our national security and foreign policy in the best interest of the American people, not the President’s personal or political interest.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested strongly on Sunday that she was considering pushing to impeach the president if certain demands related to the whistleblower were not met. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Speaking to CNN’s “State of the Union,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., also said impeachment was on the table. Schiff previously has claimed to have hard evidence that the Trump team improperly colluded with Russia.

“Why doesn’t the president just say, ‘Release the whistleblower complaint.’ Clearly he’s afraid for the public to see,” Schiff said. “This would be the most profound violation of the presidential oath of office, certainly during this presidency, which says a lot, but perhaps during any presidency. There is no privilege that covers corruption. There is no privilege to engage in underhanded discussions.”

The top Democrats’ rhetoric came soon after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday night kickstarted a dormant, but long-simmering and occasionally explosive feud with top House Democrats in the form of a fiery tweet: “At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior – it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it.”

Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appeared to reach a truce of sorts after a closed-door meeting in July, in which both sought to ease infighting that some Democrats viewed as counterproductive. That meeting came shortly before the departure of Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti.

Fox News’ Alex Pappas, Jake Gibson, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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