Dear John,

Simon published a new piece this morning that argues that Congress, in order to best serve the American people and fulfill its Constitutional obligations, should consider breaking down the Impeachment process into three separate tracks - the criminal, the co-conspirators, and a national security review. You can find the piece here, and below.

We hope you enjoy and feedback is welcome of course.

Best, Chris

The House Should Consider Breaking Impeachment Into Three Parallel Tracks

By Simon Rosenberg

The more we have come to understand about the President’s months long effort to illegally pressure two Ukrainian governments into doing political favors for him, the more difficult it has become for the House to move swiftly and to keep the process “narrow.” Consider what we’ve learned. We know now the scandal involves many more people than just the President, dozens perhaps. A parallel federal criminal investigation into the scandal has been launched, has already arrested two associates of the President, and these two men have already implicated the President, Rep. Nunes, Rudy Guliani and others. And once again the influence of Russia over the President and his team has been raised — an issue so serious it cannot be wished away.

The Mueller investigation took almost two years. Ken Starr looked into Bill Clinton for more than four. The House has been at it for only a few months, and while some brave Administration officials have come forward to testify, access to critical witnesses and documents have been illicitly withheld by the President. There is a real chance that a swift and narrow process will prevent the American people and the Senate from seeing the complete picture of what has happened, and would allow senior government officials who have committed crimes to walk away without the level of accountability democracies require.

So, to best serve the American people and fulfill its Constitutional obligations, Congress should consider breaking down the Impeachment process into three separate tracks — the criminal, the co-conspirators and a national security review. Let’s look at each in turn:

The Crimes— In the coming weeks, and in preparation for an early 2020 Senate trial, the House should develop its core argument for why the removal of the President is required and why it should happen now, before the 2020 elections. Congress can establish that the President broke election laws in 2016 (Stormy, the Foundation) and illegally obstructed a legitimate investigation into his campaign throughout 2017 and 2018. In the Ukraine affair he has done it again — broken election laws, and illegally obstructed, again. If he is not removed, it is reasonable to assume that he will attempt to break laws again next year. As sworn guardians of the Constitution, the House just cannot let that happen.

While the House can establish the gravity of the President bribing and extorting a foreign ally, I think it must also bear down on the repeated election law violations of the President and work to explain just how serious a crime “cheating” is in a system like ours. It speaks to a profound contempt for democracy, a disregard for what at the end of the day has been the central source of American greatness. It is the very definition of a “High Crime” — a crime not against a person but the very idea of America itself.

In the recent press conference announcing the arrest and indictment of two of Trump’s associates in the Ukraine affair, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, law enforcement officials went out of their way to explain the gravity of election law violations. FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney declared: “Campaign finance laws exist for a reason. The American people expect and deserve an election process that hasn’t been corrupted by the influence of foreign interests…..These allegations aren’t about some technicality, a civil violation, or an error on a form. This investigation is about corrupt behavior and deliberate law breaking. The FBI takes the obligation to tackle corruption seriously — there are no exceptions to this rule.”

US Attorney Geoffrey Berman added: “Protecting the integrity of our elections — and protecting our elections from unlawful foreign influence — are core functions of our campaign finance laws. And as this Office has made clear, we will not hesitate to investigate and prosecute those who engage in criminal conduct that draws into question the integrity of our political process.”

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner has written compellingly why election law violations should be exempt from the Department of Justice policy of not prosecuting a sitting President: “If a president can act unlawfully to influence an election, he does not deserve the protections of his ill-gotten office. This incongruity encourages lawlessness in the quest for the presidency and then rewards that lawlessness by inoculating the criminal president against prosecution. Such a construct is dangerous.”

What ethical leader has had so many around him fall under investigation, get indicted and jailed? Cohen, Flynn, Fruman, Gates, Guiliani, Manafort, Nunes, Papadopoulous, Parnas, Pinedo, Stone and van der Zwann. Or so many Cabinet officials resign due to scandal? Rampant criminal and lawlessness around Trump is something which will also need to be firmly established in the months ahead.

It is evident that the President is a serial criminal and should be removed from office. That he has repeatedly violated US election laws, cheated and committed crimes against our democracy itself, makes his removal before the 2020 general election an urgent and patriotic endeavor.

Prosecute The Co-Conspirators — In order to allow Congress to focus on the case against the President, the House should create a process where the President’s co-conspirators in the crimes of bribery, extortion, election law violations and obstruction of Congress are allowed to face the evidence against them and defend themselves in public. Perhaps it can be one day, one conspirator, and at the end of each proceeding the House Committee overseeing this process can vote on whether the evidence available and testimony warrants a criminal referral of the Administration official to the Department of Justice.

Fortunately, the Department of Justice has already established a team overseeing the criminal prosecution of those in the Ukraine affair. The House led criminal referrals can be made directly to that established team. The whole thing process can be completed in a few weeks, and executed shortly after the Senate trial ends for expediency’s sake.

Among those who should be compelled to defend their actions are the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the acting Chief of Staff, the Attorney General and others the House has reason to believe committed crimes in service of the President’s illegal scheme.

A Security Review — In the Ukraine affair, the evidence suggests the President put his own interests above those of the United States, and not only betrayed the nation but also in the process damaged our standing in the world and national security. Evidence suggests this is not the only time the President has done this, and Congress must investigate his dealings with Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China. The awful possibility that the Presidential has serially betrayed the nation, leaving us far weaker on the global stage, is such a grave matter that it must undergo a thorough review that is separate from the more rapid consideration of his recent lawbreaking.

At the very core of this security review should be a comprehensive assessment of the President’s repeated actions to benefit our most significant historic adversary, Russia. Wherever one looks in the world, one sees the American President taking steps to align our policies with Russia’s foreign policy aims, weakening America and elevating Putin. The cumulative record is astonishing — the years long refusal to condemn Putin’s repeated attacks our democracy, his abandonment of Syria and the Kurds, his reversal in Venezuela, his undermining of Zelenskyy and Ukraine, his embrace of Brexit and denigration of Europe and NATO, his recent easing up on Iran, his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords and just in the past few days new worries have emerged his ultimate aims in Afghanistan and Lebanon.

That last Friday the President repeated a Russian originated false and frankly ridiculous story about the 2016 attack on America’s democracy — within hours of one of America’s leading Russia experts calling on him and other Republicans to stop peddling it — adds fresh urgency to this vital task.

This process is perhaps the most serious of all the steps Congress could take in the coming months, and should not have any timetable associated with it. While the review could be led by the Intelligence Committee and look and feel a lot like what we’ve experienced over the past month or so, the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees should be expected to proceed with concurrent public hearings and investigations to help ensure a thorough and complete review. Efforts should be made to allow those Members with significant national security experience to play leading roles in the proceedings.

In order to conduct these investigations with the kind of thoroughness that the American public would expect, Congress should work to aggressively compel the Department of Justice to turn over all materials gathered by Robert Mueller in his two year long look at Russia’s efforts to penetrate and influence domestic US politics. That the fully Mueller Report has still never been turned over to Congress remains among the significant outrages of the Trump era.

In sum, there is a powerful logic for Congress to move swiftly to remove the President as he has shown a dramatic disregard for US election law, and is very likely to continue cheating in the 2020 election. Simply, it cannot stand. But Given Senate Republicans stated intent to turn the Senate trial into a wildly partisan Hannity-inspired circus, however, it is critical the House find ways to keep the Inquiry open past the trial period to make it far more challenging for the President to corruptly claim exoneration, as he did, malevolently, in the Mueller process. Breaking Impeachment into three track as described in this essay, will allow the House to make an initial set of time-sensitive criminal charges for the Senate to consider, keep the criminal inquiry open in case more matters arise, hold those who have been involved in the President’s vast Ukraine conspiracy accountable, and to conduct a thorough review of the damage done to US national security by the President’s illicit foreign dealings.

Congress was reluctant to go down this path. But the President’s lawlessness and his repeated willingness to dangerously sacrifice our national interests leaves Congress no choice but to proceed, and to do so in a way which reminds the American people and the world that this great democracy is something very much worth fighting for.