Impeachment

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, let me just begin with a note of optimism. You are going to get to pick the next President, not a bunch of politicians driven by sour grapes. I don't say that lightly. I didn't vote for President Trump. I voted for somebody I wouldn't know if they walked in the door. But I accepted the fact that he won. That has been hard for a lot of people to do. And it is not like I am above the President being investigated.

I supported the Mueller investigation. I had Democratic colleagues come to me and say: We are afraid he is going to fire Mueller. Will you stand with us to make sure Mueller can complete his investigation? And I did--2 years, $32 million, FBI agents, subpoenas, you name it. The verdict is in. What did we find? Nothing. I thought that would be it.

But it is never enough when it comes to President Trump. This sham process is the low point in the Senate for me. If you think you have done the country a good service by legitimizing this impeachment process, what you have done is unleashed the partisan forces of Hell. This is sour grapes.

They impeached the President of the United States in 78 days. You cannot get a parking ticket, if you contested it, in 78 days. They gave out souvenir pens when it was over.

If you can't see through that, your hatred of Donald Trump has blinded you to the obvious. This is not about protecting the country; this is about destroying the President.

There are no rules when it comes to Donald Trump. Everybody in America can confront the witnesses against them, except Donald Trump. Everybody in America can call witnesses on their behalf, except President Trump. Everybody in America can introduce evidence, except for President Trump. He is not above the law, but you put him below the law. In the process of impeaching this President, you have made it almost impossible for future Presidents to do their job.

In 78 days, you took due process, as we have come to know it in America, and threw it in the garbage can. This is the first impeachment in the history of the country driven by politicians.

The Nixon impeachment had outside counsel, Watergate prosecutors. The Clinton impeachment had Ken Starr, who looked at President Clinton for years before he brought it to Congress. The Mueller investigation went on for 2 years. I trusted Bob Mueller. And when he rendered his verdict, it broke your heart. And you can't let it go.

The only way this is going to end permanently is for the President to get reelected. And he will.

So as to abuse of Congress, it is a wholesale assault on the Presidency; it is abandoning every sense of fairness that every American has come to expect in their own lives; it is driven by blind partisanship and hatred of the man himself. And they wanted to do it in 78 days. Why? Because they wanted to impeach him before the election. I am not making this up. They said that.

The reason the President never was allowed to go to court and challenge the subpoenas that were never issued is because the House managers understood it might take time. President Clinton and President Nixon were allowed to go to article III court and contest the House's action. That was denied this President because it would get in the way of impeaching him before the election.

And you send this crap over here, and you are OK with it, my Democratic colleagues. You are OK with the idea that the President was denied his day in court, and you were going to rule on executive privilege as a political body. You are willing to deal out the article III court because you hate Trump that much.

What you have done is you have weakened the institution of the Presidency. Be careful what you wish for because it is going to come back your way.

Abuse of Congress should be entitled ``abuse of power by the Congress.'' If you think Adam Schiff is trying to get to the truth, I have a bridge I want to sell you. These people hate Trump's guts. They rammed it through the House in a way you couldn't get a parking ticket, and they achieved their goal of impeaching him before the election.

The Senate is going to achieve its goal of acquitting him in February. The American people are going to get to decide in November whom they want to be their President.

Acquittal will happen in about 2 hours; exoneration comes when President Trump gets reelected because the people of the United States are fed up with this crap. But the damage you have done will be long- lasting.

Abuse of power. You are impeaching the President of the United States for suspending foreign aid for a short period of time that they eventually received ahead of schedule to leverage an investigation that never happened. You are going to remove the President of the United States for suspending foreign aid to leverage an investigation of a political opponent that never occurred. The Ukrainians did not know of the suspension until September. They didn't feel any pressure. If you are OK with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden doing what they did, it says more about you than it does anything else. The point of the abuse of power article is that you made it almost impossible now for any President to pick up the phone, if all of us can assume the worst and impeach somebody based on this objective standard. He was talking about corruption in the Ukraine with a past President.

And the Bidens' conduct in the Ukraine undercut our ability to effectively deal with corruption by allowing his son to receive $3 million from the most corrupt gas company in the Ukraine. Can you imagine how the Ukrainian Parliamentarian must have felt to be lectured by Joe Biden about ending sweetheart deals?

What you have done is impeached the President of the United States and willing to remove him because he suspended foreign aid for 40 days to leverage an investigation that never occurred.

And to my good friend Dick Durbin, Donald Trump has done more to help the Ukrainian people than Barack Obama did in his entire 8 years. If you are looking for somebody to help the Ukrainian people fight the Russians, how about giving them some weapons?

This is a sham. This is a farce. This is disgusting. This is an affront to President Trump as a person. It is a threat to the office. It will end soon. There is going to be an overwhelming rejection of both articles. We are going to pick up the pieces and try to go forward.

But I can say this without any hesitation: I worry about the future of the Presidency after what has happened here. Ladies and gentlemen, you will come to regret this whole process.

And to those who have those pens, I hope you will understand history will judge those pens as a souvenir of shame.

Mr. President, this is my second Presidential impeachment. My first was as a House manager for the impeachment of President Clinton. I believe President Clinton corruptly interfered in a lawsuit filed against him by a private citizen alleging sexual assault and misconduct. It was clear to me that President Clinton tampered with the evidence, suborned perjury, and tried to deny Paula Jones her day in court. I believed then and continue to believe now that these criminal acts against a private citizen by President Clinton were wholly unacceptable and should have cost him his job. However, at the end of the Clinton impeachment, I accepted the conclusions of the Senate and said that a cloud had been removed from the Presidency, and it was time to move on.

During the Clinton impeachment, I voted against one Article of Impeachment that related to lying under oath regarding his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While the conduct covered by that article was inappropriate, to have made such conduct impeachable would have done grave damage to the Presidency by failing to recognize that, in the future, the office will be occupied by flawed human beings. It was obvious to me that President Clinton's lying under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, while wrong, was not a high crime or misdemeanor and that many people in similar circumstances would be inclined to lie to protect themselves and their families.

As to the impeachment of President Trump, I feel compelled to condemn the impeachment process used in the House because I believe it was devoid of basic, fundamental due process. The process used in the House for this impeachment was unlike that used for Presidents Nixon or Clinton. This impeachment was completed within 78 days and had a spirit of partisanship and revenge that if accepted by the Senate will lead to the weaponization of impeachment against future presidents.

President Trump was entirely shut out of the evidence gathering stage in the House Intelligence Committee, denied the right to counsel, and the right to cross-examine and call witnesses. Moreover, the great volume of evidence gathered against President Trump by the House Intelligence Committee consists of inadmissible hearsay. The House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings were, for lack of a better term, a sham. And most importantly, the House managers admitted the reason that neither the House Intelligence Committee nor the House Judiciary Committee sought testimony in the House from President Trump's closest advisers, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, is because it would have required the House to go to court, impeding their desire to impeach the President before the election. It was a calculated decision to deal article III courts out of President Trump's impeachment inquiry due to a political timetable. The Senate must send a clear message that this can never, ever happen again.

As to the substance of the allegations against President Trump, the abuse of power charge as defined by the House is vague, does not allege criminal misconduct, and requires the Senate to engage in a subjective analysis of the President's motives and actions. The House managers argued to the Senate that the sole and exclusive purpose of freezing aid to Ukraine was for the private, political benefit of President Trump. It is clear to me that there is ample evidence--much more than a mere scintilla--that the actions of Hunter Biden and Vice President Biden were inappropriate and undercut American foreign policy.

Moreover, there was evidence in the record that officials in Ukraine were actively speaking against Candidate Trump and were pulling for former Secretary of State Clinton. Based on the overwhelming amount of evidence of inappropriate behavior by the Bidens and statements by State Department officials about certain Ukrainians' beliefs that one American candidate would be better than the other, I found it eminently reasonable for the President to be concerned about Ukraine corruption, election interference, and the behavior of Vice President Biden and his son Hunter. It is hard to believe that Vice President Biden was an effective messenger for reform efforts in Ukraine while his son Hunter was receiving $3 million from Burisma, one of Ukraine's most corrupt companies.

As Professor Dershowitz described, there are three buckets for examining allegations of corrupt motive or action with regards to impeachment. The first is where there is clearly only a public, national benefit, as in the analogy of freezing aid to Israel unless it stops building new settlements. The second is the mixed motive category in which there is a public benefit--in this case, the public benefit of exposing the Bidens' conduct in the Ukrainian energy sector--and the possibility of a personal, political benefit as well. The third is where there is clearly a pure corrupt motive, as when there is a pecuniary or financial benefit, an allegation that has not been made against President Trump.

It is obvious to me that, after the Mueller report, President Trump viewed the House impeachment inquiry as a gross double standard when it comes to investigations. The House launched an investigation into his phone call with President Zelensky while at the same time the House showed no interest in the actions of Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden. The President, in my view, was justified in asking the Ukrainians to look into the circumstances surrounding the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, and whether his termination benefited Hunter Biden and Burisma.

It is clear to me that the phone call focused on burden-sharing, corruption, and election interference in an appropriate manner. The most vexing question was how the President was supposed to deal with these legitimate concerns. The House managers in one moment suggest that President Trump could not have asked the Attorney General to investigate these concerns because that would be equivalent to President Trump asking for an investigation of a political rival. But in the next moment, the House managers declare that the proper way for President Trump to have dealt with those allegations would have been to ask the Attorney General to investigate. They cannot have it both ways. I believe that it is fair to criticize President Trump's overreliance on his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate alleged corruption and conflicts of interest regarding the Bidens and Burisma. However, I do not find this remotely an impeachable offense, and it would be beneficial for the country as a whole to find ways to deal with such matters in the future.

Assuming the facts in the light most favorable to the House managers, that for a period of time the aid was suspended by President Trump to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and election interference, I find both articles fail as nonimpeachable offenses. I find this to be the case even if we assume the New York Times article about Mr. Bolton is accurate. The Ukrainians received the military aid and did not open the requested investigation.

The abuse of power Article of Impeachment is beyond vague and requires a subjective analysis that no Senator should have to engage in. It also represents an existential threat to the Presidency. Moreover, the obstruction of Congress article is literally impeaching the President because he chose to follow the advice of White House counsel and the Department of Justice and he was willing to use constitutional privileges in a manner consistent with every other President. This article must be soundly rejected, not only in this case, but in the future. Whether one likes President Trump or not, he is the President with privileges attached to his office.

The House of Representatives, I believe, abused their authority by rushing this impeachment and putting the Senate in the position of having to play the role of an article III court. The long term effect of this practice would be to neuter the Presidency, making the office of the President only as strong as the House will allow.

The allegations contained in this impeachment are not what the Framers had in mind as high crimes or misdemeanors. The Framers, in my view, envisioned serious, criminal-like misconduct that would shake the foundation of the American constitutional system. The Nixon impeachment had broad bipartisan support once the facts became known. The Clinton impeachment started with bipartisan support in the House and ended with bipartisan support in the Senate, even though it fell well short of the two-thirds vote requirement to remove the President. In the case of President Trump, this impeachment started as a partisan affair with bipartisan rejection of the Articles of Impeachment in the House and, if not rejected in the Senate, will lead to impeachment as almost an inevitability, as future Presidents will be subject to the partisan whims of the House in any given moment.

My decision to vote not guilty on both Articles of Impeachment, I hope, will be seen as a rejection of what the House did and how they did it. I firmly believe that article III courts have a role in the impeachment process and that, to remove a President from office, the conduct has to be of a nature that would shake the very foundation of our constitutional system. The impeachment of President Trump was driven by a level of partisanship and ends justify the means behavior that the American people have rejected. The best way to end this matter is to allow the American people to vote for or against President Trump in November, not to remove him from the ballot.

These Articles of Impeachment must be soundly rejected by the Senate because they represent an assault on the Presidency itself and the weaponization of impeachment as a political tool. They must fail for a variety of reasons. First, the conduct being alleged by House managers is that there was a temporary suspension on military assistance to Ukraine, which was eventually received ahead of schedule to leverage an investigation that never occurred. This is not the constitutional earthquake the Founders had in mind regarding bribery, treason, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Second, the articles as drafted do not allege any semblance of a crime and require the Senate to make a subjective analysis of the President's motives. Third, the record is abundant with evidence that the President had legitimate concerns about corruption, election interference emanating from the Ukraine, and that Vice President Biden and his son undercut U.S. efforts to reform corruption inside Ukraine.

The second article, alleging obstruction of Congress, is literally punishing the President for exercising the legal rights available to all Presidents as part of our constitutional structure. This article must fail because the House chose their impeachment path based on a political timetable of impeaching the President before Christmas to set up an election year trial in the Senate. The Senate must reject the theory offered by the House managers with regard to obstruction of Congress; to do otherwise would allow the House in the future to deal article III courts out of the impeachment process and give the House complete control over the impeachment field in a way that denies fundamental fairness.

Because it took the House 78 days from start to finish to impeach the President of the United States and, during its fact-gathering process, the House denied the President the right to counsel, to cross-examine witnesses against him, and the ability to introduce evidence on his behalf, the Senate must reject both Articles of Impeachment.

I am compelled to vote not guilty, to ensure impeachment will not become the new normal.

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