E. J. good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. Thank you to those who are joining us online. The hashtag for this event for those who want to quot the very distinguished panel or make any comment is impeachment101. I want to thank john allen for those remarks. I think it would show the seriousness of the think tank if john allens remarks alone could make federalist 65 go viral. Perhaps we can publish federalist cyst i5 as a brookings policy brief and turn Alexander Hamilton into a temporary senior fellow but think you so much. We have become almost accustomed to impeachment but this doesnt make it any less serious or complicated. It involves constitutional issues related to accusations of abuse of power and that loaded but illdefined phrase high crimes and misdemeanors our panel will try to define those for us or talk about how they have been defined at different moments in our history. It is also inevitably political in the high sense of that word and there is a high sense of the word politics and the less high sense of that term because Public Opinion matters and the judgments of both house members and senators are inevitably affected by the views of their constituents as they should be. In the end, this is about how we govern ourselves and to paraphrase Ben Franklins much quoted line, how we can keep our republic. We are very blessed today to have a panel that is sophisticated on the law, on the constitution, on National Security and yes, on politics itself. I will introduce them and i will ask a couple of larger framing questions. We will go on and chat for a bit and then we will bring you into the conversation. We will have microphones going around the room. I think everybody in the world now knows susan hennessey, the star of stage, screen, and twitter. She is a senior fellow in National Security and government studies at brookings, the executive editor of the welfare blog and focuses on National Security issues surrounding cyber security, surveillance, federal terrorism, prosecutions and congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Her forthcoming book which he just got in her hands this weekend, a beautiful picture on twitter, is coauthored with brookings senior fellow then wit is. It is called on making the presidency, Donald Trumps war on the most Popular Office and appropriately enough it comes out on january 21. John udak is with Public Management and a senior fellow in government studies. His Research Examines questions of president ial power in the context of Administration Personnel and public policy. He also focuses on campaigns and elections and legislative executive interaction and state and federal marijuana policy. I want to say that john also is a senior fellow who behaves in the best sense like a journalist. I cannot tell you how many events i have run into john at where i did not expect to see him but now i come to express him. So i miss you when you are not at every Major Political event in our country. Elaine is an old dear friend, shes not old, im old. [laughter] e. J. i tell my kids one of the only good things about getting old is you have old friends. She is a friend of longstanding, a senior fellow of government studies as well as director for effective Public Management. She is an expert on american electoral politics, government innovation and reform. In the u. S. , oecd nations in developing countries and focuses her research on the president ial nominating system and has worked on many president ial campaigns. You just might tell us a bit about how in the world is this going to affect the nominating process in the other party from the president. Lastly, Margaret Taylor is a fellow in government studies at the brookings institution. She is also Senior Editor and counsel in law and was previously chief Democratic Council and deputy staff director for the Senate ForeignRelations Committee from 2015 two july, 2018, and its great to have you with us. She will tell us everything senators are privately saying about the choice they have to face today. I want to ask what i think is the obvious question. This seems to have moved very, very fast as of two and a half weeks ago. Many of the leading folks on the democratic side who were not for impeachment, including the speaker of the house, were not for impeachment and then the story about ukraine and what President Trump said in that phone conversation broke. We were at a very different place. Perhaps i can go straight down the line and ask has it moved as fast as it seems or were there things working underneath and why now . Why has this happened . Susan, please. Susan i think it has moved as fast as it i think it has moved as fast as it seems and is moving very quickly in a very real and practical way. I think we have to acknowledge that support for impeachment in the house is probably been has probably been artificially deflated by the lack of public support by leadership. There is something sort of pent up that is coming out now. The reason why this has been a Tipping Point is it is an on unambiguous example of abuse. This is the president of the United States of the United States using the powers of his office, the constitutional power to conduct Foreign Policy on behalf of the United States, in order to essentially, as alleged, extort a foreign leader into pressuring, investigating a political opponent in violation of that political opponents opponents Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights not for policy purposes on behalf of the United States but for the president on personal political gain. So this really is the sort of staggering nature of the alleged abuse. I think its one of those cases in which you know it when you see it. We have come to this point and we are seeing this degree of rapid movement. I think its just a response to the seriousness of the allegations. The seriousness of not just the allegations but actually what has been confirmed by the white house itself and released in a summary transcript of the call. E. J. thank you. John . John i agree with everything susan said. This is such an unambiguous example of what a president can be impeached for. But what is also important is that it fits into a narrative that we have about the president or at least the democrats have about the president with regard to the manner in which he conducts Foreign Policy, particularly in Eastern Europe and with some of the players involved there. But this also moved rapidly in part because there were questions about the president already in existence. Its not as if democrats in Congress Went from a position of believing that the president is good and righteous and is doing his job and upholding his oath perfectly, to use the president s words, but there were all of these questions. When Something Like this happened, it was very easy for them to go to, from a position of deep skepticism of the president to ready to impeach the president. Thats important. I think it means that messaging is going to be easier. I think it means for the president , that his approach is something that he and his staff should have been prepared for because this is not necessarily a shocking moment that we are ready for impeachment. But the shocking thing about this impeachment as susan said is it is such a glaring example of the type of behavior we do not expect from our public servants. E. J. elaine . Elaine let me put a little meat on the outline that john just gave. One of the reasons that this is so fast and so sudden or seems so, is the straw that broke the camels back. Lets start and 2016 in april. We see the first ads which we now know were backed by the russians coming out of st. Petersburg. We see the first ads interfering in the 2016 election. We get to the summer of 2016 and there are two events that have gotten attention but not for the right thing. The first event is the famous press conference at the Doral Golf Club where candidate trump says to the reporters, if the russians are listening, i want to know whats in hillarys emails. What has been forgotten about that press conference is he is also asked about russia and the ukraine. He says, yeah, we will be looking into that, indicating that his Foreign Policy with russia and the ukraine is not the same as has been Foreign Policy of the United States. The second event that goes on in the summer is everybody heard about the trump tower meeting with the russian intermediary. We have forgotten that at the republican convention, two its two weeks before the convection convention, they wrote a platform. Usually these platform meetings, you can see very clearly where the president ial candidate is having their impact. The campaign has no interest, no interest in any of the pieces of the republican platform, they get to write a traditional republican platform with u. S. Policy toward russia, that was the only one. This is hidden in plain sight. We go to the transition and sure enough, the National Security advisor has an illegal meeting with the Russian Ambassador which eventually cost him his job. He is only in the job for a month. He fires comey and the next day, he meets with the Russian Foreign minister and the Russian Ambassador the next day. And he throws everybody out of the meeting except for the russians. We are looking at something that is telling us something and i think for a long time, we didnt want to see what was going on. Then we get to the helsinki summit. And the helsinki summit, the president s behavior after the helsinki summit, is outrageous. If you want a summary of that, look at john allens piece on the brookings website that he wrote immediately after that. People with Foreign Policy background say what on earth is he doing there . In fact, the helsinki summit causes the largest number of republican senators to attack their president as has ever happened. Weve got a lot in plain sight. Then comes this news of this phone call. And on the democratic side, you have Seven Members of congress, all brandnew, they are women, five of them are veterans, to two are former cia analysts and this just tips it. All of a sudden, this is not the far left saying impeach the guy because we disagree with him on health care. All of a sudden, the this has gotten a different level of seriousness and one that frankly has been bothering people for three years. And here we are. E. J. margaret . Margaret i absolutely agree. I was the one to talk about the freshman democrats. I totally agree, just to say it out loud, we have had the Mueller Investigation and the Mueller Report. That is part of this whole backdrop. I totally understand that different americans use the Mueller Report in different ways. For anyone who has asked the gone in and read it or listened to susans great podcast about the content of the Mueller Report, that is a really crucial backdrop for understanding this news story. I understand its been quick. It was only two weeks ago, i was rambling to write an article for lawfair with the question of what is adam schiff talking about with this whistleblower complaint. That was a mere two weeks ago and now we know a whole lot more. I would also say this set of facts and case to really two really important things that i think we had not really seen before necessarily. One is getting a Foreign Government to interfere in our election. Obviously, that was part of the Mueller Report but here its in our faces. And that goes to the heart of the sovereignty of our democracy, who will decide in our elections who will represent us as president , who will decide these questions . And we as americans have always thought we will decide. This particular set of facts seems to have the president putting that into some question. The second thing goes to elaines point about the seven freshmen democrats who have National Security backgrounds. This set of facts implicates National Security. I just want to say that i have worked in Foreign Policy for a long time. Our assistance to ukraine in our and our support for ukraine is crucial to be continued existence of ukraine. We dont quite remember that when we think about a domestic scandal here. The United States and europe are so important to ukraine because putin literally invaded ukraine in 2014 and annexed crimea. Literal invasion of the country, that is why they are so dependent on the west, europe and the United States. The idea that the president would use that crucial assistance, ukraine needs to protect itself from russia as part of a scheme to help the president s reelection really is a crucial National Security issue. I think that is something that is different and has made it move fast because it is a National Security issue. E. J. thank you. I will go one more round and i apologize to margaret. You happened to have your name begin with a t. We have two hs. Im just going to go all the way down a second time on what i think are two crucial and interrelated questions which are in a sense how fast and how far . I will go with the how far first. We were talking about the event about how articles of impeachment look. How congress decides what to impeach on, how many articles to have, how broad, how narrow. This in turn implicates how long this process might be. I wonder if you could all talk about how the house is likely to go about making these decisions, what are the splits we are seeing between broader or narrower or something in between and talk a bit about the time. I will start with susan and go down the line. Susan i think this is really a critical question. Its important the house anchors its impeachment inquiry in understanding that this is a grave and serious constitutional responsibility. It needs to be really disciplined. Impeachment is an airing of grievances against the president , not a mechanism to achieve things where you cannot build a legislative coalition. It is a very, very serious and unique remedy in cases of serious abuse. When you think about what actually might fall with in those articles of impeachment, we are seeing a span right now of people moving forward on this narrow ukraine call all the way to people saying you should include family separation everything we have seen this president do. Whatever we think about what should be in the codes of and articles of impeachment, think about two things. You want unambiguously impeachable conduct and you want unambiguously strong evidence. We have some areas in which there is very strong evidence but its not clear its impeachable conduct. Evidence of wrongdoing. The Stormy Daniels payments, prepresident ial conduct that implicates campaignfinance law. We have a clear evidentiary record but the question of whether prepresident ial conduct would fall within that starts to become a little bit more difficult. The emoluments clauses violation, very serious questions, some open questions about the constitution, congress has not yet taken steps to pass laws. That will be more difficult to make the argument. Genuine policy differences, even things we might find personally abhorrent like family separation which is a policy disagreement, you dont get to impeach for that. There is a different category which is unsatisfying to leave that on the table. Theres another category of plainly impeachable conduct in which the evidence is not quite strong enough. The president reportedly has offered people pardons in exchange for violating the law in the context of border security. Unambiguously impeachable conduct, the record is murky, maybe he was kidding or maybe he didnt say it. We have to ask ourselves, putting that stuff aside, what are we left with . We think about on them vigorously impeachable and strong evidence. The answer to that question is a lot. [laughter] susan the first one is obstruction of justice. This is the big question that remains after the Mueller Report. Not every episode obstruction of justice is restrung but there are two or three that are unambiguously the statutory requirements we would expect to see congress intentionally potentially impeach for that. Abuse of Foreign Policy powers are using Foreign Policy powers for personal gain, thats an abuse. Inviting foreign interference in American Election is an abuse. The violation of the oath of office or targeting political opponents for investigations, not just in a foreign context but also things like directing the attorney general to investigate Hillary Clintons emails. That is not an appropriate use of u. S. Law enforcement. Obstruction of congre