The US House of Representatives Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said the chamber will file impeachment charges against President Donald Trump.
“Today I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment,” she said a day after the House Judiciary Committee began considering potential charges against the Republican president.
On Wednesday, three U.S. constitutional scholars told Congress that President Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses by pushing Ukraine to open investigations to benefit him politically.
These are Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, and University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt.
The constitutional scholars recalled the history from more than two centuries ago when the country’s founding fathers wrote into the Constitution that presidents could be impeached and removed from office if lawmakers decide they have committed ““treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”, VOA reports.
Feldman, Karlan and Gerhardt all said that Trump had met the criteria for impeachment laid out in the Constitution, describing his actions as an “abuse of power.”
Trump is accused of breaking the law by pressuring Ukraine’s leader to dig up damaging information on a political rival – Joe Biden.
In July, he urged his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate one of the frontrunners to take him on in next year’s presidential election.
This matters because it is illegal to ask foreign entities for help in winning a US election.
The Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., will be responsible for drafting specific articles of impeachment.