Democrats aim to impeach Trump by Christmas

House Democrats are moving aggressively to wrap up their historic, weeks-long investigation into President Trump before 2020, potentially setting up a climactic vote to impeach him just before Christmas. The timeline has come into sharper focus as Democrats have made a series of critical moves signaling they are shutting down the closed-door fact-finding phase of the inquiry and shifting now to Phase 2: making the case for impeachment to the American public. Congressional investigators, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), appear to have wrapped up the last of 15 private depositions of current and former Trump administration officials. This week they began publishing thousands of pages of transcripts from those interviews. And next week, Democrats will launch the first public, televised hearings of their nearly seven-week-long impeachment inquiry, calling three career foreign service officials who have already testified that Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and their allies were seeking a brazen quid pro quo with Ukraine. “I think, without being hasty, again, but being expeditious and deliberative, that the House ought to set for themselves a target of having dealt with this in the Intelligence Committee and Foreign Affairs and Oversight and the Judiciary Committee and on the floor by Christmas,” Rep. Denny Heck (D-Wash.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Thursday night. “That's a tough schedule. But it's a doable schedule, given where we're at and all the work that's been done thus far,” Heck said. There are other signs that Democrats are charging toward a December floor vote to make Trump just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Several top Trump officials who played pivotal roles in the administration's dealings with Ukraine — including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — have defied subpoenas compelling them to testify behind closed doors, but Democrats have shown little appetite to resolve the matter in court. After watching their Mueller and Russia probes get bogged down in never-ending court battles, Democrats appear to be moving on without testimony from those key witnesses rather than engage in another lengthy lawsuit against the administration....MORE