Page:Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States — Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives.pdf/94

 Zelensky investigate the widely debunked conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government—and not Russia—was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network in 2016. According to this conspiracy theory, the American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike moved a DNC server to Ukraine to prevent United States law enforcement from examining them. Here is how President Trump presented his solicitation:

"I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible."

Shortly thereafter, on the same phone call, President Trump expressly solicited an investigation into former Vice President Biden and his son. In so doing, he referenced former Vice President's Biden involvement in the removal of a corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutor:

"The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me."

c.The Pressure Campaign

As set forth in the First Article of Impeachment, "President Trump—acting both directly and through his agents within and outside the United States Government—conditioned two official acts on the public announcements that he had requested." These two official acts were: (1) the release of vital military and security assistance to Ukraine that President Trump had ordered suspended; and (2) a valuable, strategically important head of state meeting with President Trump at the White House. There is overwhelming evidence that President Trump made these official acts conditional on his sought-after announcements in order to pressure Ukraine. It is also clear that Ukrainian officials came to understand that they were being pressured in this manner. That evidence is comprehensively explained in the Ukraine Report; we will briefly summarize it here.