Eric Swalwell

Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked impeachment managers who mostly didn’t seek out the job, opting for a reserved team over more boisterous members who wanted to be involved.

Although Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff, the lead manager, and Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler were picks who obviously wanted to serve, the other five managers — Zoe Lofgren, Hakeem Jeffries, Val B. Demings, Jason Crow and Sylvia R. Garcia — were not members who lobbied for the role. 

House Democrats are backing Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s power move to hold articles of impeachment in the House until the Senate agrees to what Democrats say will be fair procedures for a trial, but it’s unclear how long their patience for this game of chicken with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will last.

Pelosi announced the move at a news conference late Wednesday night after the House impeached President Donald Trump, and then briefly explained her thinking with Democrats at a meeting Thursday morning.

President Donald Trump lied on Wednesday about the nature of a phone call with Rep. Debbie Dingell in February after the death of her husband, former Rep. John Dingell, she said in an interview Thursday.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, Trump told his version of the story to a crowd of more than 9,000 people as he lambasted Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, for voting to impeach him that night.

Democrats and Republicans have been making their respective cases for and against impeaching President Donald Trump for months, but it is Wednesday’s debate on the House floor that will be memorialized in history.

Lawmakers have already made their arguments through weeks of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees’ proceedings, news conferences and cable TV appearances, so what they say Wednesday will be repetitive to those who’ve been paying attention. 

The expected impeachment of President Donald Trump this week will give some lawmakers a potentially career-defining opportunity to present the House’s case against the president to the country during a Senate trial next month.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will decide who and how many impeachment managers will travel to the other side of the Capitol to make arguments, present evidence, question witnesses and more in just the third time in U.S. history that a sitting president has been on trial before the Senate.

The House Judiciary Committee began marking up articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening and is expected to vote on them Thursday.

In his opening statement, Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler addressed why impeaching Trump was warranted when a presidential election is less than a year away. 

House Democrats spoke for months about how investigations had established crimes that President Donald Trump committed, but on Tuesday they did not specifically include those allegations in articles of impeachment under the constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The two articles of impeachment Democrats filed — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — stayed away from detailing where Trump might have broken the law with his dealings with Ukraine or interactions with the special counsel probe into Russian interference with the 2016 election.

Judiciary Democrats spent roughly seven months investigating a litany of allegations that President Donald Trump abused his power, but the charges laid out in the articles of impeachment unveiled Tuesday don’t reflect any of that work.

The result is the latest sign that the panel with sole jurisdiction over drafting articles of impeachment has been marginalized as its probe became overshadowed by allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his domestic political rivals, withholding a White House meeting and congressionally appropriated security assistance as leverage.

As President Donald Trump live-tweeted his reaction to House Democrats’ impeachment articles, his spokeswoman vowed he would “continue to work on behalf of this country.” Hours later, that business included huddling privately with Vladimir Putin’s top diplomat in the Oval Office.

Trump essentially thumbed his nose at Democrats as they continued linking his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine’s president to an alleged affinity for Russia’s as he hosted Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s minister of foreign affairs. If Lavrov steps foot in the Oval Office, it’s a safe bet there is a controversy nearby.