In a brief comment to the Daily Beast following Trump’s impeachment vote by the House of Representatives, Democratic Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and lead investigator in the impeachment inquiry Adam Schiff acknowledged that the move could only “embolden” Donald Trump.
The remark came following Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s recent trip to Ukraine, which according to POTUS brought “a lot of good information” that would eventually be presented before Congress and the Department of Justice. During a fact-finding trip to Kiev and Budapest, Giuliani interviewed several Ukrainian prosecutors in an effort to prepare a documentary series promoting an alternative version to the House’s impeachment narrative.
When asked about the development, Schiff acknowledged that he did not have a “complete answer” to this.
“Because given the continuing nature of his violations of his oath, we have to expect that’s not going to stop”, Schiff said. “I would hope that the accountability of the impeachment might provide a guardrail, but it could also have the effect of emboldening him”.
“We’ll continue to do our oversight work”, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee continued. “That’s all we can do. And if there’s additional wrongdoing, exposing it—that’s all we can do”.
The impeachment inquiry's lead investigator also noted that he did not believe that Donald Trump would feel “vindicated” following the House’s vote, but neither would he “change his ways”.
“It puts the country in a tough position”, Schiff concluded.
The outlet also noted that several other Democrats were still eager to look into other scandals related to the ongoing Ukrainian saga, but were unwilling to continue with similar probes unless something significant about the US president would be exposed that would potentially impact the GOP’s support for him. Nevertheless, some Democratic representatives, such as Ro Khanna, were confident that Donald Trump was still trying to influence the 2020 presidential election through apparent abuse of power, despite being impeached by the House of Representatives on a similar charge.
A lengthy debate in the US House of Representatives and a subsequent vote on 18 December determined that Donald Trump would be impeached on two articles - a charge of obstruction of Congress and one of abuse of power. The impeachment inquiry against Trump was launched by the Democrats in September after a whistleblower complaint alleging that the president had pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate allegations of corrupt business practices by 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.