Opinion | Why I Was Wrong to Oppose Impeachment

Earlier this year on these pages I argued against moving forward with impeachment proceedings against President Trump. From my experience as press secretary to President Bill Clinton, I believed impeaching Mr. Trump could backfire politically for Democrats. More important, I believed impeachment proceedings at that time could have jeopardized a bigger political and policy prize — the collapse of Mr. Trump’s Republican Party and the prospect of progressives controlling the White House and Congress for many years to come.

Last Friday, I tweeted that it was now a political imperative for the Democrats to move forward with impeachment. What changed?

It’s simple: the revelations of Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel Ukraine to falsely discredit a political opponent.

I believed then and I believe now that the most appropriate place to litigate the malfeasance and incompetence of this administration is at the ballot box in 2020. But that simply cannot happen if the president is allowed to use the awesome power of American military and economic aid to solicit foreign interference in the election. We can’t allow the president to pervert the next election with foreign interference, especially after what happened in 2016.

A whistle-blower’s complaint released Thursday and the White House reconstruction of a phone call between Mr. Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, confirm Mr. Trump’s abusive pressure on Ukraine and implicate Attorney General William Barr and Mr. Trump’s private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in the scheme. Reports that senior members of the intelligence community referred this to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution, only to have the department refuse to investigate, cement even further the need to move forward on impeachment.

The last week underscores that Mr. Trump will pull any lever available to him to unfairly and illegally influence the outcome of the next election. His Ukraine gambit might not be the last effort to pressure foreign governments to discredit Democrats. Mr. Trump has shown that few things can deter him from illegal behavior. The Mueller report only emboldened him: His call to Mr. Zelensky came the day after Mr. Mueller testified before Congress about his findings.

The president clearly believed the lack of consequences for the actions detailed in the Mueller report gave him a green light to pursue any advantage in the next election — no matter how unethical or illegal.

The question now is not if Mr. Trump should be impeached but how. The Democrats’ political model should be the opposite of what Republicans did in 1998. The impeachment of Mr. Clinton was driven entirely by political calculation and played out exactly that way. Democrats going forward need to demonstrate that this is not about politics, but about the Constitution and the presidential abuse of power.

The fact that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, resisted efforts to rush to impeachment gives her enormous credibility in that regard. No one can seriously compare her to Newt Gingrich in 1998. He gleefully raced to impeachment on the thinnest of pretexts in the hopes of politically hobbling a president he opposed. Ms. Pelosi initiated impeachment only after it became clear that no other option could protect the American people and the Constitution from the abuses of a lawless president.

This is a point that will need to be made relentlessly. Democrats must remind voters constantly that they gave Mr. Trump every opportunity to cooperate with congressional oversight investigations but were stonewalled by highly questionable claims of executive privilege by the Trump administration.

Practically, the speaker should move quickly by appointing a select committee to get these proceedings out of the circus of the House Judiciary Committee. That may ruffle some political feathers, but Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has been the most skilled interrogator and communicator about Russian interference in the 2016 election. He should run the committee.

The bulk of the questioning should be done by professional counsel. The skewering of Corey Lewandowski by the staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee, Barry Berke, made clear that this is not about political statements, it’s about getting to the truth. I also believe that the majority of the fact finding should be done behind closed doors with regular public hearings where committee counsel testify on what they’ve found.

The public hearings should only be used for the most important witnesses like Donald F. McGhan II, the former White House counsel, his deputy, Annie Donaldson, and the intelligence community whistle-blower. The investigators’ guiding principle should be just the facts, not the theater.

Ultimately, the House proceedings should stand in stark contrast to what we can expect from the Senate. Under the leadership of the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, we can expect a show trial designed to obscure the facts rather than getting to the bottom of them.

Politically, the long game is still to force Republicans to face the voters with Mr. Trump as their standard-bearer. The election was always going to be a referendum on his character and his unconventional view of the Constitution and presidential power. If the Democrats proceed in a serious and thoughtful way they can force the entire Republican Party into a choice that ensures defeat — break with Mr. Trump and lose his voters, or stick with him and get defeated by a country that has had enough.

Yes, it is a risk for Democrats. But no amount of political risk can outweigh the now clear and present danger President Trump presents to our democracy and a legitimate election in 2020.