What Happened?
On Tuesday, Sept. 24, Democratic Party House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry involving President Donald Trump, according to NBC News. The inquiry charges him with betraying his oath of office and compromising national security.
The Hill reported that Trump allegedly pressured Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as well as his son, Hunter Biden, for corruption charges.
According to the Washington Post, Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky was part of a whistleblower complaint that the Trump administration withheld from Congress.
In Context
The decision for a formal impeachment inquiry came after Trump reportedly suggested Zelensky work with Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, on corruption investigations involving former vice president Joe Biden.
Trump’s suggestion came days after blocking nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, the Washington Post stated.
The request to block aid was reportedly relayed to the State Department and the Pentagon at an interagency meeting in July.
“I don’t think it really matters . . . whether the president explicitly told the Ukrainians that they wouldn’t get their security aid if they didn’t interfere in the 2020 elections,” U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy said. “There is an implicit threat in every demand that a United States president makes of a foreign power … that foreign country knows that if they don’t do it, there are likely to be consequences.”
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the White House released a reconstructed transcript of Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in hopes of settling down suspicions of wrongdoing on the President’s behalf.
The latest
On Thursday, Sept. 26, Trump likened the actions of those providing information to the whistleblower to that of a spy, stating that spies were dealt with differently “in the old days,” according to the LA Times.
“The whistleblower’s complaint is completely different and at odds from my actual conversation with the new President of Ukraine,” Trump tweeted. “The so-called ‘Whistleblower’ knew practically nothing in that those ridiculous charges were far more dramatic [and] wrong.”
On Saturday, Sept. 28, Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke called for Trump to resign, stating that his resignation would be the best possible path to allow the country to heal from its state of division, according to CNN.
“If we were, because of a fear of division or the politics or polling of this issue, to desist in the necessary effort to hold this President accountable, we will, by extension, have destroyed any chance of this country being able to continue as a democracy,” O’Rourke said.