Democrats Unveil Two Articles of Impeachment Against Trump; Deal Reached to Advance USMCA Trade Agreement; U.K. Election.
ROSEMARY CHURCH, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Hello and welcome to our viewers joining us from all around the world. I'm Rosemary Church. Coming up on CNN NEWSROOM, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Democrats unveil articles of impeachment on yet another historic day in Washington. Also the threat of more volcanic eruptions disrupt recovery efforts on New Zealand's White Island. Plus it's crunch time for politicians in the U.K. on the final day of campaigning ahead of the general election.</s>CHURCH: Good to have you with us. We begin with the political turmoil in Washington. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is getting ready to debate the two articles of impeachment against U.S. president Donald Trump on Wednesday. After a two month investigation, Democrats unveiled the articles Tuesday, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. So what's next? Well first, a vote by the Judiciary Committee on whether are to impeach the president which could be followed by a full House vote as soon as next week. President Trump is downplaying it, calling it impeachment light and week.</s>TRUMP: He said other so-called articles of impeachment today. People are saying or, they're not even a crime. What happened? All of these horrible things. Remember? Bribery and this and do that, so where are they, they said these two things are not even a crime. This is the lightest, weakest impeachment.</s>CHURCH: With the articles now unveiled, Donald Trump is another step closer to becoming just the third U.S. president to ever be impeached. CNN's Alex Marquardt has more.</s>REP.  NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): Good morning, everyone.</s>ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): A solemn day, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it, as the Democratic leadership announced for just the fourth time in American history articles of impeachment against a president. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler laying out the two articles that charged the president with committing high crimes and misdemeanors, the first, abuse of power.</s>REP. JERRY NADLER (D-NY), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: That is exactly what President Trump did when he solicited and pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 presidential election.</s>MARQUARDT: The second article, obstruction of Congress.</s>NADLER: President Trump engaged in unprecedented, categorical and indiscriminate defiance of the impeachment inquiry. We must be clear. No one, not even the president, is above the law.</s>MARQUARDT: Other articles of impeachment had been discussed, but were eventually ruled out, including obstruction of justice going back to the Mueller probe, which some Democrats objected to including.</s>REP.  ELIOT ENGEL (D-NY): The prevailing feeling was that we were better off ultimately with two, because the obstruction of justice brought in a whole bunch of things and it was a mixed bag of tricks.</s>MARQUARDT: Republicans, for their part, blasted today's announcement as a political move that is an embarrassment to Congress.</s>REP.  KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): We would never be here if they paid attention to the facts or the hearings. This is not a day that America will be proud about. It's not a day that history will write, that anybody wants to repeat.</s>MARQUARDT: GOP leaders attacking the speed with which Democrats conducted their investigation in just over two months, which House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said would otherwise get dragged out by the president into a crucial election year.</s>REP.  ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time? That is what that argument amounts to. The president's misconduct goes to the heart of whether we can conduct a free and fair election in 2020.</s>CHURCH: CNN's Alex Marquardt reporting from Washington. Well, joining me now to talk more about this is CNN political analyst Michael Shear. He is also the White House correspondent for "The New York Times." Good to have you with us.</s>MICHAEL SHEAR, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Sure Happy to do it.</s>CHURCH: So as expected, the Democrats charged the president with high crimes and misdemeanors, calling for his removal from office. They introduced these two articles of impeachment, abuse of power linked to Ukraine and obstruction of Congress.</s>CHURCH: How smart is the strategy of focusing on just these two articles of impeachment given the supporting evidence they have?</s>SHEAR: I think the Democrats and the leadership in Congress think it's really smart. They have decided to focus narrowly on a specific case, obviously the Ukraine case, because they think that's where the strongest evidence was. There was a lot of debate inside the Democratic Party in the House. Some members wanted to go much broader and wanted to bring in the Mueller investigations and the Russian meddling and perhaps charge the president with the another article of impeachment related to that case. There were other members that wanted to go even broader and bring another things that the president has done wrong in their view, but in the end Speaker Pelosi and I think the leadership in the House decided that it was smarter to simply take the strongest case they had. The case that they have been investigating into such depth over the last couple of months and really focus it narrowly on that the idea being that you garner as much support as you can around the very narrow impeachment.</s>CHURCH: And the Republicans called the announcements political and an embarrassment to Congress, not surprisingly. The big question now will be what will happen when it goes to trial and vote with the Senate next month?</s>SHEAR: Right, I mean, one of the remarkable things that, you know, a lot of times in Washington especially on Congress -- there's a real uncertainty about how a vote might go, because Washington is pretty closely divided these days. We are a polarized nation and so oftentimes were hanging on to one vote either way. And you never quite sure what's going to happen. In this case, I think it is the opposite, right. Everybody knows what's going to happen in a Judiciary Committee in the next couple of days, they're going to approve these articles. Everybody knows what's going to happen on the House floor. The House is easily going to impeach him and so the only sort of semi uncertainty is kind of how the Senate trial plays out at the beginning of next year. Everybody is quite sure that the Democrats won't to be able to muster 67 votes, two thirds of the Senate required to remove the president from office, but still how the trial plays out, whether they will be witnesses, whether the president would appear to sort of speak in his own behalf. All of that is kind of up in the air and uncertain and I think that's definitely got both parties kind of on edge.</s>CHURCH: Because we know the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell wants a short Senate impeachment trial with no witnesses but that's at odds with what President Trump wants. What is going on there do you think?</s>SHEAR: I think the majority leader has made the conclusion that the sooner they can get this whole impeachment drama behind them, the better for his members, at the end of the day when they go home for reelection in 2020, they're not going to be touting the fact that they spent a lot of time on impeachment. They want to be talking whether they approved judges or legislation or other pieces of legislation that they got approved. I think there obviously is in conflict with what the president at least publicly has said he wants, which is a robust defense. He wants members of his party to stand up and not simply argue, make process arguments but actually argued the merits of the case and the president, of course, thinks the call with President Zelensky was perfect. He thinks he has done nothing wrong and he wants people to stand up and in a trial and say that. I think that at the end of the day the Senate majority leader and the majority of Republicans who are in the Senate have probably the power to decide which direction they go. But obviously a lot of pressure from the president.</s>CHURCH: There has to be said that the irony of the day, Russia's foreign minister meeting President Trump in the Oval Office. What were the optics of that happening on the same day the president faces articles of impeachment over Ukraine, especially given the controversial meeting Mr. Trump had with the Russians back in 2017?</s>SHEAR: I mean, look, one of the great, amazing things about how everything has been playing out over the last several weeks, is that it's not -- the American people and people around the world could be excused to think that it this all sort of disconnected from each other. And yet it's not. The Russia investigation was about election meddling, the Ukraine situation is about election meddling. The Ukraine situation is not disconnected from Russia, it is actually integrally connected to the idea of Russian aggression. And so it's all in a weird way sort of coming full circle.</s>SHEAR: And as you say the optics of the foreign minister of Russia being in the Oval Office at exactly the moment Democrats are taking up these articles of impeachment was I think not lost on anyone.</s>CHURCH: Michael Shear, always good to get your analysis and perspective on these matters. I appreciate it.</s>SHEAR: Thank you. Thank you for having me.</s>CHURCH: And we go to Moscow now, where CNN's Matthew Chance has more on President Trump's talks with the Russian foreign minister.</s>MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the fact neither U.S. nor Russian media were allowed to take a photograph of the meeting between President Trump to the Russian foreign minister, underlines how sensitive this encounter was, particularly at a time where President Trump is facing an impeachment process for withholding military aid from Ukraine, the country which Russia has invaded. In a news conference after the meeting foreign minister Lavrov spoke of a range of issues that he and the U.S. president had discussed, arms control, the conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan, the situation with the Iranian nuclear deal and economic cooperation between the United States and Russia. He did not give a clear answer, however, when asked repeatedly if President Trump had warned Russia not to interfere in U.S. elections. The White House insists that President Trump did issue such a warning. When pressed on the issue, Lavrov acknowledged the U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo spoke on the matter but made no reference to President Trump. This was the first official meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and Lavrov since May 2017, when Trump is alleged to have discuss highly classified intelligence with the Russian foreign minister and the then Russian ambassador. Lavrov also confirmed an invitation to Trump in Moscow next year but said that the American president was yet to decide whether or not he would come -- Matthew Chance, CNN, Moscow.</s>CHURCH: And even as they try to impeach him, U.S. House Democrats have shown they can still play nice President Trump, they announced a deal Tuesday on the revised trade pact with Canada or Mexico, getting the president closer to one of his signature campaign pledges to do away with NAFTA. But the deal still needs approval from both Houses of Congress and the Senate will wait until after any impeachment trial. More now from CNN's Matt Rivers in Mexico City.</s>MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Today was a bit of an unusual day during the Trump administration, if only because we have not seen many things like this happen in terms of a bipartisan agreement and yet during a formal signing ceremony that is what we saw with the latest version of the USMCA.</s>RIVERS: And being agreed upon, we have some video of that ceremony with here, led by U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer with Jared Kushner, they were one of the architects of this. And you see them, along with two representatives of the Mexican and Canadian governments signing this latest version of this new trade agreement between these countries. Of course, the first version of the USMCA was signed one year ago, between all three countries but you have to get it ratified by your respective legislatures, in Canada, the United States and Mexico, it was the United States to held this up because they would not sign on to the first version of the USMCA that was negotiated by the Trump administration. They demanded lots of changes, not the least of which will be further enforcement mechanisms. They were concerned over certain labor practices in Mexico, that they wanted to make sure certain enforcement mechanisms that could ensure that labor laws would be followed. But after a year of negotiating between the House Ways and Means Committee and the U.S. trade representative within the Trump administration, that both sides were able to agree on the deal, that led to the signing ceremony today, here in Mexico City between those three parties. It's not done yet, all three sides have to get the new deal ratified by their respective legislatures. But all signs as of now point to that just being a formality, including in the United States, with Nancy Pelosi saying this is a very good deal. We are expecting there could be a vote to ratify this latest version of the USMCA in the House of Representatives by next week at the earliest. But again a rare case of bipartisan agreement here in Mexico City with both Republicans and Democrats looking at this new version of the USMCA and calling it a win -- Matt Rivers, CNN, Mexico City.</s>CHURCH: Well, President Trump is feuding with his FBI director again. How a watchdog report on the Russia probe is dividing the Justice Department. That's coming up. Plus, New Zealand grappling with the aftermath of a deadly volcanic eruption and the possibility of a another one on the rise. The latest ahead.