Unchecked Read online

  Dedication

  For Alex, Karen, and Ara

  . . . and Bill Duryea, without whom we would

  probably still be writing

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Authors’ Note

  Prologue

  Part One 1: “Impeach the motherfucker”

  2: “All the subpoenas”

  3: Pressure Points

  4: Release Valves

  5: Trump Freed

  6: The Runaway Chairman

  7: Whistleblower

  8: The Messengers

  9: A Perfect Call

  10: Impeachment by Another Name

  11: “The dynamite line”

  Part Two 12: The Rise of Schiff

  13: “Keep your powder dry”

  14: Spin Factory

  15: “The one-way ratchet”

  16: Revenge of the Diplomats

  17: Defending the Indefensible

  18: “Get over it”

  19: The Price of Principle

  20: Get Tougher

  21: “More like Nixon”

  22: Planning Ahead

  23: Missed Opportunities

  24: Showtime

  25: “Build a better case”

  26: The Client

  27: Nadler’s Last Stand

  28: Cold Feet and a Defection

  29: Impeached

  Part Three 30: “Mutually assured destruction”

  31: The Moderates

  32: Trump Whisperer

  33: Pre-Trial Positioning

  34: Schiff’s Lecture Hall

  35: Bolton’s Bombshell

  36: Mitch’s Pressure Cooker

  37: The Musk Ox Caucus

  38: Autopilot

  39: “Politics will break your heart”

  40: “The impeachment that wasn’t”

  Part Four 41: Shattering the Guardrails

  42: Impeachment 2.0

  43: Speak Republican

  44: Peer Pressure

  45: Trial Take Two

  46: The Other Jaime

  47: Falling Short

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  In November 2019, just a few weeks into the House’s high-profile impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, we were working the weekend, burrowed deep in the bowels of the U.S. Capitol building in hallways that had become our second home. It was just before a series of blockbuster public hearings were set to begin, and we were staking out the House Republicans’ and Democrats’ competing practice sessions, hoping to get a scoop about the strategies each side planned to trot out before the cameras.

  Karoun, then a national security reporter on Capitol Hill, approached Rachael, who covered congressional leadership, with a bottle of water and a proposition. “Let’s write a book together,” she suggested. Rachael was already there; in fact, she had just spoken with an agent.

  By then, we’d cemented ourselves as the two top reporters on the impeachment beat for the Washington Post. Karoun, who had recently returned from a stint reporting in Russia, was the intelligence panel whisperer, giving us inroads to the committee leading the effort to oust Trump. Rachael, who had logged almost a decade covering Capitol Hill, had a deep network of sources within House leadership circles. Together, we had spent hundreds of hours staking out the secure facility in the basement of the Capitol, where lawmakers were investigating whether Trump had abused his office to secure his own reelection. We had tag-teamed chasing members of Congress down narrow halls and hounding them deep into the night for insights into what was going on behind closed doors. We had covered for each other when we needed a break for coffee or food—and even when we needed to steal moments in the bathroom to cry over a bad breakup and a failed round of IVF.

  But for all the time we had spent witnessing history in the making, we knew this once-in-a-generation event was moving way too fast to fully comprehend. And we weren’t alone.

  That fall, every time we huddled with editors at the Washington Post to talk through our coverage, they often prodded us with questions we couldn’t answer: What do you mean Democrats were only planning two weeks’ worth of hearings in a process that traditionally took months? What do you mean investigators wouldn’t pursue subpoenas of key firsthand witnesses—and that there wouldn’t be any witnesses at the trial?

  At the time, all we knew was that House Democrats felt confident they had the goods on Trump and were eager to move quickly. Yet when the president was easily acquitted a few months later in the Republican-controlled Senate, the fireworks of impeachment faded as fast as they had initially erupted. The simultaneous emergence of a deadly pandemic and the approaching presidential election quickly pulled the public’s attention elsewhere.

  But the lingering questions about impeachment still remained unanswered. How could a president who shattered norms so readily just skirt accountability so easily—and emerge even stronger? Why had Democrats pulled certain punches? And did Republicans really see nothing wrong with Trump’s behavior? And most of all, was the outcome as preordained as everyone seemed to think it was? As we set about writing our book, we vowed to get those answers.

  We spent thousands of hours deconstructing everything we had already witnessed and re-interviewing sources, including lawmakers from both parties, Hill staffers, White House officials, and others who had played some role in the impeachment investigation and trial. What we learned from our more than 250 interviews surprised us, even though we were two of the most plugged-in reporters on the impeachment story. And it completely changed our understanding of what had happened.

  We discovered that political calculations—not fact-finding—dominated nearly every key decision of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment strategy. We learned that some House Democrats were sounding dire warnings early on that the party was bungling its case against Trump—and leaving half the nation behind. We found that while Democrats said they wanted bipartisanship, when presented with ways to achieve it, they chose paths that guaranteed the opposite. We also were told about the panic that gripped Trump’s key GOP congressional allies in the early days of the impeachment probe—and how they consciously muzzled their scruples in order to ardently defend the president publicly. A clear picture began to form of an impeachment that had been crippled by doubt and exploited by avarice—emboldening the president and weakening the legislative branch.

  And then, just as we were finishing our manuscript, it happened again.

  The circumstances and the fact of Trump’s second impeachment were unprecedented; yet the same problems that plagued the first impeachment hobbled the second one too. Even armed with a better case, Democrats chose expediency over thoroughness in the name of saving the agenda of newly elected president Joe Biden. Republicans who were disgusted by Trump’s behavior on January 6 found narrow procedural escape hatches to avoid convicting a former president who still held sway over their political futures. And the result was a further degradation of Congress’s oversight authority—and the efficacy of impeachment overall.

  This is the never-before-told story of what actually happened behind the scenes of the historic impeachments of Donald Trump, when Democrats twice deployed Congress’s most powerful weapon against the same president—and failed both times to bring him down. The efforts to oust Trump garnered round-the-clock, obsessive media coverage, dominating headlines and cable news. But the full picture of what transpired on Capitol Hill has never been revealed until now. At a time when congressional oversight was more vital than ever, lawmakers repeatedl
y fumbled in their bid to rein in a president determined to upend the democratic system, emboldening one of the most divisive and controversial presidents in American history and exposing deficiencies in the constitutional order—particularly regarding impeachment.

  The prevailing narrative of these two critical years—from the Democratic takeover in early 2019 to the dramatic weeks after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection—has been overly simplistic. The conventional wisdom in Washington has been that Republicans turned a blind eye to the misbehavior of their party’s leader and thus empowered him to greater acts of recklessness. And that Democrats simply couldn’t overcome the intransigence of Trump’s congressional lackeys, who defended him despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt. But while there is some truth to that narrative, the reality of what occurred, we learned, was far more complex: Trump escaped accountability not simply because his own party wouldn’t stand up to him, but because the opposing party was also afraid to flex the full force of its constitutional muscle to check him. Republicans didn’t just block and sabotage impeachment—Democrats never went all in, fumbling their best chance to turn the American public away from Trump for good.

  Rather, under the leadership of a cautious Speaker, Democrats hesitated when they could have acted decisively following a special counsel’s findings that Trump had effectively obstructed justice—and may have even lied to investigators. Instead, they fixated on political concerns, worried that blowback from the populist president could cost them their House majority. Even when revelations that Trump had tried to bully a foreign ally into smearing his 2020 election rival pitched the House into an impeachment investigation, Democrats rushed through an artificially narrow probe, leaving serious allegations against Trump on the cutting-room floor. And they eschewed court fights for firsthand testimony that might have persuaded Republicans of Trump’s guilt—or at least attracted more public support.

  The result was a half-baked inquiry riddled with holes that Republicans readily and shamelessly exploited to keep their ranks united behind Trump. The Senate’s subsequent acquittal vote unleashed Trump to act on his worst instincts with impunity—and ultimately set the stage for his second impeachment. Even after Trump incited a mob to violently attack the Capitol, Democrats once again prioritized political expediency over full accountability, forgoing witnesses during the trial in the name of safeguarding the Biden agenda and bypassing an opportunity to turn GOP voters against Trump when he was most vulnerable. Congress emerged from the exercise riven by bitter partisanship—and left Trump room for a political comeback.

  There have been countless books written about Trump and his unprecedented White House. But none has taken a hard look at the Congress that tried and failed to keep him in check, or chronicled the two impeachments that were definitional for his presidency—and for American democracy itself. Our work, in that regard, occupies a unique space in the vast library of Trump-related narratives. It is the only forensic account to date of the critical two years in which a divided legislature was called upon to test the strength of the Constitution’s checks and balances—and twice found them, and themselves, to be lacking.

  Many political observers believe the country’s unbridgeable and toxic partisan divide had doomed the efforts to oust Trump from the very start. There’s little doubt that historic levels of distrust between the parties severely worsened their chances of striking the type of bipartisan cooperation needed to confront Trump—the kind that was a hallmark of the Watergate probe that resulted in Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency. But our reporting revealed key moments when things might have swung a different way.

  Few know, for example, that during the first impeachment, one of Pelosi’s own chairmen warned her against taking procedural shortcuts that could repel Republicans—loopholes that House GOP leaders readily exploited to keep wavering members of their rank and file in line. Or that a conservative House Republican approached Pelosi on the chamber floor to tell her he was open to impeaching the president—if only she would take the time to run a more complete investigation. Until now, it has never been reported how top House Republicans tried to get the president to cooperate with the probe, only to end up loudly defending a stonewalling strategy they feared would cause long-term institutional damage. Neither has the extent to which Trump’s defenders panicked when they first learned that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden—nor how closely then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell coached the president’s lawyers, shaping their arguments throughout the trial despite his private disgust with Trump’s actions toward Ukraine.

  Our book reveals how ugly partisan politicking took precedence over serious oversight, in both parties. It shows how Republican leaders grossly misled their own members to whip them into an indignant fervor—while Democratic leaders catered to the demands of politically vulnerable novices over the caution of some of their own investigative chairs. It documents, for the first time, how rank-and-file Democrats began to question the Speaker’s judgment, especially when the party turned a blind eye to egregious Trump conduct falling outside the narrow scope of the impeachment investigation. And it details how both parties failed to learn from their mistakes, even after a horde of Trump sycophants laid siege to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, sending Democrat and Republican alike running for their lives.

  In painstaking, minute-by-minute detail, we show how Democratic and Republican congressional leaders had a sense of shared purpose during the unprecedented assault, working side by side from a secure location to wrest control of the Capitol back from a Trump-inspired mob. Their successful cooperation—and their shared trauma—could have laid the groundwork for Congress reclaiming its oversight role and demanding accountability from the president all of them believed had incited the attack.

  But once again, they missed their moment. Republicans eager to secure their own political futures—or fearful of turning Trump into a martyr—either vocally opposed impeachment or quickly sought to sweep the incident under the rug, leaving GOP voters with the distinct impression Trump did nothing wrong. And Democratic leaders quietly pressured their own prosecutors to abandon their fight for conviction prematurely, to free Joe Biden’s fledgling presidency from the shadow of Trump. Even after the first attack on the Capitol in over two hundred years—and the only one ever perpetrated by American citizens—Congress treated its oversight responsibility, and its constitutionally derived power to impeach and convict, as burdens too heavy to bear.

  The ultimate result was more than a second acquittal of Trump, permitting the forty-fifth president to contemplate another run for office and allowing Trumpism to grow even stronger. The failed effort exposed the devastating limits of impeachment, Congress’s most powerful tool for holding a president to account. Trump’s moves to run roughshod over congressional subpoenas and investigations—and Democrats’ acquiescence—created a standard of unhindered executive power for future leaders to emulate and exploit. By laying bare the fundamental weakness of Congress’s greater oversight power, Trump’s two impeachments shook the foundations of the constitutional order that had governed the nation for more than two centuries, throwing the future balance of government checks and balances into doubt and weakening impeachment as a tool for future Congresses.

  “No one is above the law,” Pelosi frequently said in reference to Trump during this time. Yet if anything, Congress’s efforts to hold Trump to account—and the decisions on both sides of the aisle that led to his acquittals—revealed how despite the Framers’ best intentions, a president can remain unchecked.

  Authors’ Note

  Our reporting is informed by hundreds of hours of interviews with almost every main player in the Trump impeachment sagas, including members of Congress, White House officials, witnesses, lawyers, and staffers who worked on the investigations, impeachments, and trials. They shared notes from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership meetings and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s private lunches with senator
s, text messages of their exchanges with other lawmakers, and firsthand stories of interactions with Trump in the Oval Office.

  Given the sensitive nature of what happened—and the continued posturing around such politically contentious events—we conducted our more than 250 interviews on deep background. That allowed our sources to speak frankly and honestly, and permitted us to tell their stories—and those of their bosses and associates—in greater detail than would have been possible had we insisted on full attribution. We did this for the sake of history, to enable people to come forward and ensure our book is as complete, accurate, and unvarnished an account of what occurred as possible.

  Sources spoke with us for many reasons. Some talked to set the record straight. Others to contradict narratives they felt were unfair or inaccurate, or refute the spin promoted by their party leaders. Still others talked for their own therapeutic purposes. Many, in fact, were still digesting the chaos of what they had lived through and trying to decipher the conclusions they should draw from two failed impeachments of Trump.

  For the facts in our story, we relied on multiple sources. Quotes in the book were described to us by people who were present for the conversations—or multiple people who had been informed about them. We have used italics to indicate a person’s internal thinking, according to our reporting, or a more vague recollection of what someone said when our sources could remember the gist, but not the precise phrasing, of certain exchanges.

  Major characters in the book have been given a chance to respond to our reporting. Several key lawmakers contested new revelations we unearthed, and for transparency’s sake, we included their pushback in the Notes section in the back of the book. We also included explanations of how we determined which account was accurate—and why in certain instances, despite characters’ denials, we stuck by our reporting.