Pressure points

Two months after the now-infamous July phone call between the U.S. and Ukrainian presidents, the two of them met in person Wednesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. At a joint news conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he never felt any obligation to help President Donald Trump’s reelection chances as a result of what was said on the call.

“Nobody pushed me,” Zelensky said.

“In other words,” Trump added, “no pressure.”

Democrats are scouring documents and questioning witnesses for any evidence that could prove otherwise. On Tuesday, after months of reining in her caucus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., formally announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry against the president based on a whistleblower complaint about the call, which the White House initially withheld from Congress.

“[Democrats] had better hope that they find the smoking gun that they think is out there,” Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said in an interview on Wednesday’s edition of The World and Everything in It. “Because if they don’t, I think this has the possibility of making President Trump look like a martyr.”

Amy Black, a political science professor at Wheaton College, said in the end it will come down to whether Democrats can find enough evidence to make a case that Trump abused the powers of his office.

A memo released Wednesday by the White House shows Trump asked Zelensky on the call to “do us a favor” and cooperate with U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump also asked Zelensky to look into whether Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation.

“The framers knew the bar would be very, very high [for impeachment],” Black said, adding, in this case, that means “not just asking another foreign leader to do something—that happens all the time. But asking a foreign leader to do something that will help you politically.”

On the call, Trump never directly mentioned offering aid in exchange for Zelensky’s cooperation. But Democrats claim Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine in exchange for personal political favors. It is unclear whether Zelensky knew that days before the call, Trump directed U.S. officials to freeze $400 million in military aid for Ukraine. Officials have since lifted the freeze.

As of Thursday afternoon, 220 members of the House (219 Democrats and one independent) said they supported the impeachment inquiry—above the 218-vote threshold needed to pass a bill. If the House eventually passes articles of impeachment, it would take 20 Republican senators joining all of their colleagues from across the aisle to convict the president.

So far, Republicans in Congress have either remained quiet or spoken out in Trump’s defense.

“The GOP will present a united front unless and until it becomes apparent that there is enough internal dissension to tip the scales, in which case there could be a bandwagon effect against Trump,” said Paul Miller, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and a former National Security Council staff director during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “All you have to do is convince them that a President Mike Pence is more electable in 2020 than Trump.”