January 22, 2020

Watch Adam Schiff Lay Out His Case Against Trump to Open Day 2 of the Impeachment Trial

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

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On the second day of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, lead House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) summarized the argument for impeachment and rebuked the president for “abusing the power of his office to seek help from abroad to improve his reelection prospects at home.”

“President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into two discredited allegations that would benefit President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign,” Schiff said. “When the Ukrainian president did not immediately assent, President Trump withheld two official acts to induce the Ukrainian leader to comply: a head of state meeting in the Oval Office, and military funding.”

Trump’s gravest misstep, according to Schiff, was his withholding of military aid from Ukraine. “President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to a strategic partner at war with Russia to secure foreign help with his reelection,” he said. “In other words, to cheat.”

He continued, “The president used official state powers available only to him and unavailable to any political opponent to advantage himself in a democratic election. His scheme was undertaken for a simple but corrupt reason: to help him win reelection in 2020. But the effect of his scheme was to undermine our free and fair elections and to put our national security at risk.”

Watch the video below:

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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