How Are Republicans Responding To Trump Ukraine Scandal? What Some Are Saying About The Impeachment Inquiry As Vote Looms

House Republicans Monday upstaged Democrats, issuing their own assessment of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment investigation and concluding no impeachable offenses were committed.

The Democrat-led committee was expected to release its report later this week on President Trump’s actions toward Ukraine and forward it to the House Judiciary Committee, which will decide whether to draft articles of impeachment. The Judiciary Committee holds its first hearing Wednesday.

In their 110-page report, raking Republicans Devin Nunes of the Intelligence Committee, Jim Jordan of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Michael McCaul of the Foreign Affairs Committee cover the talking points Republicans have been trotting out for weeks and concludes the investigation produced a parade of “unelected bureaucrats” who disagreed with Trump’s style and decisions.

“Their disagreements with President Trump’s policies and their discomfort with President Trump’s actions set in motion the anonymous, secondhand whistle-blower complaint,” the report says. “For Democrats, impeachment is a tool for settling political scores and relitigating election results with which they disagreed.”

The Republicans maintain there’s no evidence Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine to pressure that country to take actions that would benefit his 2020 re-election effort. They also say there’s no evidence Trump attempted to obstruct the House investigation even though he directed administration officials not to cooperate and withheld documents subpoenaed by the committee.

The Republicans assert Trump sought an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, and a debunked conspiracy theory out of concerns over corruption.

“Where there are ambiguous facts, the Democrats interpret them in a light most unfavorable to the president,” the Republicans wrote. “The Democrats also flatly disregard any perception of potential wrongdoing with respect to Hunter Biden’s presence on the board of [Ukraine energy company] Burisma Holdings or Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election.”

The document is a “prebuttal,” giving GOP lawmakers a basis for rejecting Democrats’ anticipated articles of impeachment. It was written by Republican staff members on the Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., led a two-month investigation into whether Trump withheld $391 million in military aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing investigations into the Bidens and whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a conspiracy theory pushed by Moscow and rejected by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Zelensky told Time magazine in a weekend interview published Monday he was never aware of a “quid pro quo” but was upset military aid had been withheld.