Rachael Bade - Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congresss Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump

For Alex, Karen, and Ara

... and Bill Duryea, without whom we would

probably still be writing

In November 2019, just a few weeks into the Houses high-profile impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, we were working the weekend, burrowed deep in the bowels of the U.S. Capitol building in hallways that had become our second home. It was just before a series of blockbuster public hearings were set to begin, and we were staking out the House Republicans and Democrats competing practice sessions, hoping to get a scoop about the strategies each side planned to trot out before the cameras.

Karoun, then a national security reporter on Capitol Hill, approached Rachael, who covered congressional leadership, with a bottle of water and a proposition. Lets write a book together, she suggested. Rachael was already there; in fact, she had just spoken with an agent.

By then, wed cemented ourselves as the two top reporters on the impeachment beat for the Washington Post. Karoun, who had recently returned from a stint reporting in Russia, was the intelligence panel whisperer, giving us inroads to the committee leading the effort to oust Trump. Rachael, who had logged almost a decade covering Capitol Hill, had a deep network of sources within House leadership circles. Together, we had spent hundreds of hours staking out the secure facility in the basement of the Capitol, where lawmakers were investigating whether Trump had abused his office to secure his own reelection. We had tag-teamed chasing members of Congress down narrow halls and hounding them deep into the night for insights into what was going on behind closed doors. We had covered for each other when we needed a break for coffee or foodand even when we needed to steal moments in the bathroom to cry over a bad breakup and a failed round of IVF.

But for all the time we had spent witnessing history in the making, we knew this once-in-a-generation event was moving way too fast to fully comprehend. And we werent alone.

That fall, every time we huddled with editors at the Washington Post to talk through our coverage, they often prodded us with questions we couldnt answer: What do you mean Democrats were only planning two weeks worth of hearings in a process that traditionally took months? What do you mean investigators wouldnt pursue subpoenas of key firsthand witnessesand that there wouldnt be any witnesses at the trial?

At the time, all we knew was that House Democrats felt confident they had the goods on Trump and were eager to move quickly. Yet when the president was easily acquitted a few months later in the Republican-controlled Senate, the fireworks of impeachment faded as fast as they had initially erupted. The simultaneous emergence of a deadly pandemic and the approaching presidential election quickly pulled the publics attention elsewhere.

But the lingering questions about impeachment still remained unanswered. How could a president who shattered norms so readily just skirt accountability so easilyand emerge even stronger? Why had Democrats pulled certain punches? And did Republicans really see nothing wrong with Trumps behavior? And most of all, was the outcome as preordained as everyone seemed to think it was? As we set about writing our book, we vowed to get those answers.

We spent thousands of hours deconstructing everything we had already witnessed and re-interviewing sources, including lawmakers from both parties, Hill staffers, White House officials, and others who had played some role in the impeachment investigation and trial. What we learned from our more than 250 interviews surprised us, even though we were two of the most plugged-in reporters on the impeachment story. And it completely changed our understanding of what had happened.

We discovered that political calculationsnot fact-findingdominated nearly every key decision of Speaker Nancy Pelosis impeachment strategy. We learned that some House Democrats were sounding dire warnings early on that the party was bungling its case against Trumpand leaving half the nation behind. We found that while Democrats said they wanted bipartisanship, when presented with ways to achieve it, they chose paths that guaranteed the opposite. We also were told about the panic that gripped Trumps key GOP congressional allies in the early days of the impeachment probeand how they consciously muzzled their scruples in order to ardently defend the president publicly. A clear picture began to form of an impeachment that had been crippled by doubt and exploited by avariceemboldening the president and weakening the legislative branch.

And then, just as we were finishing our manuscript, it happened again.

The circumstances and the fact of Trumps second impeachment were unprecedented; yet the same problems that plagued the first impeachment hobbled the second one too. Even armed with a better case, Democrats chose expediency over thoroughness in the name of saving the agenda of newly elected president Joe Biden. Republicans who were disgusted by Trumps behavior on January 6 found narrow procedural escape hatches to avoid convicting a former president who still held sway over their political futures. And the result was a further degradation of Congresss oversight authorityand the efficacy of impeachment overall.

This is the never-before-told story of what actually happened behind the scenes of the historic impeachments of Donald Trump, when Democrats twice deployed Congresss most powerful weapon against the same presidentand failed both times to bring him down. The efforts to oust Trump garnered round-the-clock, obsessive media coverage, dominating headlines and cable news. But the full picture of what transpired on Capitol Hill has never been revealed until now. At a time when congressional oversight was more vital than ever, lawmakers repeatedly fumbled in their bid to rein in a president determined to upend the democratic system, emboldening one of the most divisive and controversial presidents in American history and exposing deficiencies in the constitutional orderparticularly regarding impeachment.

The prevailing narrative of these two critical yearsfrom the Democratic takeover in early 2019 to the dramatic weeks after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrectionhas been overly simplistic. The conventional wisdom in Washington has been that Republicans turned a blind eye to the misbehavior of their partys leader and thus empowered him to greater acts of recklessness. And that Democrats simply couldnt overcome the intransigence of Trumps congressional lackeys, who defended him despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt. But while there is some truth to that narrative, the reality of what occurred, we learned, was far more complex: Trump escaped accountability not simply because his own party wouldnt stand up to him, but because the opposing party was also afraid to flex the full force of its constitutional muscle to check him. Republicans didnt just block and sabotage impeachmentDemocrats never went all in, fumbling their best chance to turn the American public away from Trump for good.

Rather, under the leadership of a cautious Speaker, Democrats hesitated when they could have acted decisively following a special counsels findings that Trump had effectively obstructed justiceand may have even lied to investigators. Instead, they fixated on political concerns, worried that blowback from the populist president could cost them their House majority. Even when revelations that Trump had tried to bully a foreign ally into smearing his 2020 election rival pitched the House into an impeachment investigation, Democrats rushed through an artificially narrow probe, leaving serious allegations against Trump on the cutting-room floor. And they eschewed court fights for firsthand testimony that might have persuaded Republicans of Trumps guiltor at least attracted more public support.