Campaign Action
The House is scheduled to take a two-week recess beginning Friday. That recess needs to be canceled. The severity of Donald Trump's actions—specifically asking a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election on his behalf—demands it.
It is not enough, as New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has suggested, to have the committee "activity" continue in the background. The full House needs to be on the job. Each of the six committees involved in investigating Trump need to be on the job, fully.
At least one member of the Democratic caucus—a freshman—has cogently made the case. Rep. Susan Wild from Pennsylvania, who sits on the Ethics and Foreign Affairs committees, said, "To go home for two weeks to me just doesn’t seem like the right message. […] If our intent is to act expeditiously, how can we justify going home for two weeks?" House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself, in arguing for a very narrow, Ukraine-focused investigation, said in the full caucus meeting in which the decision to impeach was announced, "We have to strike while the iron is hot."
Now that we've seen the whistleblower complaint and the scope of the alleged wrongdoing, there's a very hot iron. There are two immediate and urgent actions the House needs to pursue: the first is to identify the multiple people the whistleblower says were witness to that phone call and the "senior White House officials [who] had intervened to 'lock down' all records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the call." The second is to identify the White House lawyers who directed White House officials to "remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored" and put them on a hidden, "separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature." The whistleblower reported that one White House official "described this as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective."
That's a textbook definition of an attempted cover-up. According to the whistleblower, multiple White House officials said that "this was 'not the first time' under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive—rather than national security sensitive—information." The House has to pursue that revelation. It has to find out what other "politically sensitive" transcripts are on that hidden server.
That has to be pursued in public, televised hearings, and it has to be pursued immediately. This isn't the time for the House to take off for two weeks. The momentum of these bombshell revelations needs to build. Two weeks will allow Trump and his minions too much time to attempt to bury it in a flurry of nonsensical countercharges and distractions.
Tell your representative to stay in Washington and continue working on impeachment.