Click on their names to learn more about their role in the Trump-Ukraine scandal and impeachment inquiry: Here are the key players, broken down by group. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over whether witnesses would appear at the trial, Pelosi transmitted the articles to the Senate and appointed impeachment managers in mid-January.Īfter Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts swore in every Senator, both sides presented three days of opening a On Wednesday, December 18, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment charging Trump with abusing his office and obstructing Congress.Īfter an impasse between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Multiple diplomats testified under oath that the Trump administration explicitly conditioned lifting the hold of the military aid to Ukraine on Zelensky publicly announcing investigations into Burisma and a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to benefit Hillary Clinton. The whistleblower's complaint has been corroborated by the White House's summary notes of the July 25 call, White House officials themselves, and the sworn testimony of several career diplomatic and national-security officials. Trump and his allies have, without evidence, accused Biden of using his power as vice president to urge Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma in order to protect Hunter. Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian oil-and-gas company, from 2014 to 2019. The complaint detailed concerns that Trump, days after withholding a nearly $400 million military-aid package, used the call with Zelensky to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
#Trump impeachment timeline series
In early September, an anonymous whistleblower complaint lodged by a member of the intelligence community said that in a series of events culminating in a July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump used "the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September. We highly recommend you read the entirety of this story so you can be as informed as possible, but you can also jump to a specific section from the table of contents below. How did we get here? And what could happen next? We hope this guide will help answer these questions. If two-thirds of senators vote to convict the president on the charges brought by the House, the president is removed from office.
#Trump impeachment timeline trial
Now that a majority of the House has voted to impeach the president on a charge of abusing his office and a charge of obstructing Congress, the Senate will hold a trial where both sides present their cases and senators act as jurors. The House, like a grand jury, collects evidence, hears testimony, and drafts articles of impeachment - or charges - against the president. The impeachment process can be thought of as somewhat analogous to a criminal proceeding, even though impeachable offenses don't have to be criminal offenses. What is impeachment? Impeachment doesn't mean automatic removal from office. Donald Trump's presidency has been upended by an explosive whistleblower complaint that has snowballed into a fast-moving impeachment inquiry, ensnaring dozens of people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and posing the most immediate threat to Trump's presidency yet.