- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday said she will send the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate next week.
- The move comes after weeks of delay as Democrats and Republicans in the upper chamber duked it out over the terms of Trump's impeachment trial.
- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week that he would move forward with a trial without committing to call witnesses, as Democrats had demanded. Pressure then mounted on Pelosi to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate after several Democrats indicated they wanted to start the trial.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she will transmit the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate next week.
The move comes following weeks of delay as Democrats and Republicans in the upper chamber duked it out over the terms of Trump's impeachment trial after the House voted to impeach the president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Specifically, Democrats wanted Republicans to commit to calling witnesses during Trump's trial and to remain impartial throughout the proceedings.
Their demands came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Trump allies, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, publicly stated that they were working closely with the White House ahead of the trial and would not act as objective jurors.
Earlier this week, McConnell said he would not move forward with the trial without committing to calling witnesses and would instead decide on that question once the trial starts, similar to what happened during Bill Clinton's impeachment in the 1990s.
Following McConnell's announcement, pressure mounted on Pelosi to transmit the articles as several Senate Democrats signaled that they wanted the trial to start.
The two articles of impeachment against the president relate to his efforts to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election by strongarming Ukraine into delivering political dirt on one of his 2020 rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, while withholding vital military aid and a White House meeting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately wanted.
Trump's actions came to light through a whistleblower complaint that an anonymous US intelligence official filed in August against the president. At the center of the complaint was a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky in which Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and look into a bogus conspiracy theory suggested Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election.
The White House released a memo of the phone call that confirmed the whistleblower's main allegation. But subsequent testimony from nonpartisan, career national-security and foreign service officers revealed that the phone call was just one data point in a months-long campaign by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to force Ukraine to accede to his demands.
Gordon Sondland, the US's ambassador to the European Union, testified that "everyone was in the loop" on Trump's efforts, including then national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and other top brass at the White House and across federal agencies.