The House Intelligence Committee will vote Tuesday on Chairman Adam Schiff’s impeachment report, which will make a case for the congressional removal of President Donald Trump.
The vote, likely to break along party lines, is a formality allowing the Democrat-controlled body to pass the impeachment inquiry on to the Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to begin its proceedings Wednesday.
The impeachment inquiry is focused on Trump’s request last summer that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy launch investigations into debunked claims the nation interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and that former Vice President Joe Biden, a Trump political rival, shut down an investigation into a Ukrainian energy firm where his son worked.
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Intelligence Committee members will be able to view a draft of Schiff’s report beginning late Monday, NBC News has learned.
The vote is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving break. If Intelligence Committee members vote to adopt the report by Schiff, D-California, it will be forwarded to the Judiciary Committee.
Trump has claimed Democrats are conducting the inquiry without due process, but earlier this week Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, invited Trump and his legal representatives to participate in the next wave of hearings.
Nadler said in a letter that Trump “has a choice to make: he can take this opportunity to be represented in the impeachment hearings, or he can stop complaining about the process.”
Trump criticized the proceedings in a Saturday night tweet and noted he would be in London on Wednesday.
“I will be representing our Country in London at NATO, while the Democrats are holding the most ridiculous Impeachment hearings in history,” he tweeted. “Read the Transcripts, NOTHING was done or said wrong! The Radical Left is undercutting our Country. Hearings scheduled on same dates as NATO!”
In a subsequent letter to Trump, asking if his lawyers would attend proceedings, Nadler quoted a draft of Schiff’s report as describing “a months-long effort in which President Trump again sought foreign interference in our elections for his personal and political benefit at the expense of our national interest.”