U.S.

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi Announces an Impeachment Inquiry on Trump.

By: Trista Shockley and Orlando Angelone

(Dukes' Dispatch) - On Tuesday September 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA 12) announced to the public a Formal Impeachment Inquiry into President Donald Trump.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution” Mrs. Pelosi said during her speech.

What the outcome of this inquiry will be is unclear at this point, but the question still remains, will President Trump be only the third President in American history to be impeached?

One of Mrs. Pelosi’s claims against President Trump is his decision to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into opening an investigation on former Vice President and Democratic Candidate for President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

News of the President doing such an act was leaked by a Ukrainian whistleblower, who stated in an August 12, 2019 complaint letter that, "I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,”

The letter further describes how the President and his lawyer Rudy Guliani attempted to pressure Zelensky and his government into investigating the Former Vice President and his son. It specifically goes into detail about a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, and the subsequent White House coverup attempt to hide the transcripts of the call.

The President, according to the Whistleblower, had the transcript of the call moved from the usual systems, and put onto a system reserved for highly classified information, where it is much less likely to be leaked to the public.

All of this information being leaked to the public is what lead House Speaker Pelosi to make the decision to change her mind on impeaching the President. Pelosi had previously been quite stubborn with pro-impeachment Democrats, saying that it was not worth while throughout the Mueller Investigation and other controversies.

But whilst many Democrats, Anti-Trump Republicans and Independents are happy, President Trump objected to the inquiry on Twitter, first stating, “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” Then saying, “Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage, So bad for our Country!”

Many allies of the President also stated that this story was nothing, and that the whistleblowers statements were overblown, such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said that, "The Democrats bought a pig in a poke."

This came with White House denial that President Trump asked Zelensky for dirt on the Bidens, but this was quickly refuted when transcripts of the calls were released to the public.

At one point in the call President Trump asks that the Ukrainians, "Do us a favor," and in another portion of the call the President says, "There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me."

This can be interpreted as President Trump asking a foreign power to give up dirt on a political opponent in order to curry political favor, which is what he was accused of doing with the entire Trump-Russia Scandal, the main difference being that there are real White House transcripts of this occurrence going down, which further damages the President.

It is yet to be seen what will happen with the Impeachment inquiry. There is still the chance that the House will not move forward. But if they do, there would be a high chance that the President could be impeached, considering the Democratic advantage in the House. This would make President Trump the third President to be Impeached, the other two being Andrew Johnson (D) and Bill Clinton (D).

The chances of the President actually being removed from office would be slim to none though, considering that to remove the president the Senate would have to vote in a two thirds majority, meaning that thirteen Republicans would have to turn on the President, and there is no sign that this will happen.

So it seems as if for now Donald Trump's Presidency is safe, though his political future may be in jeopardy.