Page:Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States — Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives.pdf/124

 encompassed other offenses, both constitutional and criminal in character, and it is appropriate for the Committee to recognize such offenses in assessing the question of impeachment.

a.Constitutional Bribery

"Bribery" under the Impeachment Clause occurs where a President corruptly offers, solicits, or accepts something of personal value to influence his own official actions. In that respect, "Bribery is . . . an especially egregious and specific example of a President abusing his power for private gain." Based on their lived experience, the Framers had good cause to view such conduct as grounds for impeachment. Bribery was considered "so heinous an Offence, that it was sometimes punished as High Treason." And it was received wisdom in the late-17th century that nothing can be "a greater Temptation to Officers [than] to abuse their Power by Bribery and Extortion."

Since the Founding, "[a] number of impeachments in the United States have charged individuals with misconduct that was viewed as bribery." However, "the practice of impeachment in the United States has tended to envelop charges of bribery within the broader standard of 'other high Crimes and Misdemeanors'" and, for the most part, "the specific articles of impeachment were framed as 'high crimes and misdemeanors' or an 'impeachable offense'" without ever "explicitly referenc[ing] bribery." Here, the First Article of Impeachment alleges what is, among other things, a bribery scheme, whereby President Trump corruptly solicited things of value from a foreign power, Ukraine, to influence his own official actions—namely, the release of $391 million in Congressionallyauthorized assistance and a head of state meeting at the White House.

The elements of impeachable bribery under the Constitution are not expressly set forth in our founding document. As Justice Joseph Story and other authorities have made clear, however, the AngloAmerican common law tradition supplies a complete and "proper exposition of the nature and limits of the offense." This Committee has reaffirmed for more than a century that "[t]he offense of bribery had a fixed status in the parliamentary law as well as the criminal law of England when our Constitution was adopted, and there is little difficulty in determining its nature and extent in the application of the law of impeachments in this country." Indeed, the four legal experts who testified before this