House Republicans are moving to repudiate or expunge the 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump, and the case for doing so keeps getting stronger. Newly declassified intelligence memos, years of congressional testimony, and a trail of State Department documents have steadily dismantled the narrative that Democrats built to justify the first impeachment, a narrative that depended on claims now contradicted by the government's own records.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is among the Republicans backing the effort. Law professor Alan Dershowitz was the first to suggest the evidence warranted expunging the 2019 vote. Rep. Claudia Tenney has rallied around the same idea. Their argument rests not on partisan grievance but on a factual record that looks nothing like what the public was told in the fall of 2019.
As John Solomon reported at Just the News, five distinct pillars of the Democratic impeachment story have buckled under the weight of later-released evidence. Each one deserves a careful look, because the gap between what Democrats told the country and what the documents show is not a matter of spin. It is a matter of record.
The entire 2019 impeachment saga began with an anonymous intelligence community whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump had improperly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden family. Democrats treated the complaint as unimpeachable, a courageous act by a nonpartisan civil servant.
The whistleblower is now confirmed to be retired CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. And memos recently released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard tell a very different story about the complaint's origins.
The declassified documents show that investigators working for then-intelligence community watchdog Michael Atkinson flagged Ciaramella for having "potential for bias." The memos also state that Ciaramella provided false information in his initial complaint, later apologized for the falsehood, and harbored animus toward conservatives inside Trump's circles. Atkinson, Democrats, and then-Rep. Adam Schiff withheld these revelations from the public, according to the released memos.
Gabbard said Ciaramella and Atkinson had "weaponized the whistleblower process" to "manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump." She referred both men to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation.
As we previously reported, declassified memos have exposed the bias behind the whistleblower who triggered Trump's first impeachment, adding documentary weight to what Republicans argued at the time.
The newly released memos also reveal the role of a second intelligence official, identified only as "Witness 2," who helped Ciaramella assemble the complaint. The details are striking, and they were kept from Congress and the public during the impeachment proceedings.
The memo states that Witness 2 reviewed the transcript of the Trump-Zelenskyy call "in order to have situational awareness of the circumstances surrounding the call" while covering for the Director of Ukraine, referred to as "Alex," who was out of the office. But Witness 2 admitted he could not independently see what Ciaramella claimed to see in the call.
"Witness 2 could not connect the same dots that Complainant did into the impact of what was said during the telephone call."
More telling still: Witness 2 acknowledged he "would not have taken independent action" on the transcript's contents. He said he "routinely deals with issues on a daily basis that are contrary to [his] personal beliefs" and "did not have the level of granular insight of details related to the Ukraine that Complainant had."
So why did he help? The memo says Witness 2 was "assisting Complainant in regard to the urgent concern because Witness 2 wants to be able to sleep at night." He described feeling "a moral and patriotic duty to help Complainant due [sic] what is right", to "sleep the sleep of the just."
The memo also flagged a vulnerability. It noted that anyone seeking to discredit Witness 2 "might focus on Witness 2 being the co-author of the 2017 ICA on Russian Interference in the 2016 election", and that "the ICA could have been, or could be looked at, as negative towards President Trump." That 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment was largely overseen by former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and James Comey.
The memo even noted that Witness 2 "worked with Peter Strozk [sic]", the FBI official whose anti-Trump text messages with colleague Lisa Page became a symbol of institutional bias during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Strzok wrote the opening communication that launched that inquiry.
None of this was shared with the public during impeachment. The pattern is consistent: information that would have complicated the Democratic narrative was suppressed.
Democrats told the country that Joe Biden, as vice president, had pushed for the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin because Shokin was corrupt and failing to pursue reform. This framing was essential to the impeachment case. If Biden's pressure on Ukraine was legitimate anti-corruption policy, then Trump's interest in the matter could be cast as an abuse of power.
But the documents paint a different picture. State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, had praised Shokin's work fighting corruption and even sent him a letter of congratulations. A memo from an interagency task force created to advise the Obama White House, composed of State, Treasury, and Justice Department officials, concluded on Oct. 1, 2015, that "Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee." That was a reference to a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee.
In other words, the Obama administration's own interagency review found that Shokin's Ukraine was making adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms, at the very time Biden was moving to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees to force Shokin's ouster.
Democrats' impeachment witnesses backed the narrative that Shokin was incompetent. State Department official George Kent testified during the proceedings that Shokin had failed. But later evidence told a different story. When asked in congressional testimony whether Shokin had been investigating Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden to sit on its board, Kent answered simply: "he did."
Devon Archer, a former Burisma board partner, testified to Congress in 2023 that Shokin's investigation was anything but dormant. Archer described Shokin as a genuine threat to Burisma's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.
"He was a threat. He ended up seizing assets of Mykola, a house, some cars, a couple properties. And Mykola actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets."
So the prosecutor Biden got fired was, by the accounts of people closest to the situation, actively pursuing the company that was paying Biden's son. The impeachment narrative required voters to believe the opposite.
Joe Biden insisted repeatedly that he maintained strict separation between his government role and his family's business dealings. His own words left no room for ambiguity.
"There will be an absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government. There wasn't any hint of scandal at all when we were there. And I will impose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That is why I have never talked with my son or my brother, or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period."
Testimony from Hunter Biden's own former business partners contradicts that claim directly. Jason Galanis told Congress in 2023 that during a 2014 meeting at a New York bar, attended by Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, and her late husband, former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, Hunter called his father on the phone.
"Hunter called his father, said hello and 'hold on, Pops,' then put the call on speakerphone and said, 'I am here with our friends I told you were coming to town, and we wanted to say hello.'"
Biden's response, as Galanis recounted it: "Ok then, you be good to my boy."
Galanis did not hedge about the purpose of the relationship. He told Congress flatly: "The entire value-add of Hunter Biden to our business was his family name and his access to his father, Vice President Joe Biden."
Rob Walker, a Biden family friend, testified in a transcript released by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer's team in 2023 that Joe Biden met with a delegation from CEFC, the Chinese energy company chaired by Ye Jianming, at a lunch in Washington, D.C. Tony Bobulinski, another former Hunter Biden business partner, told Congress that the Biden family used their name and access to Joe Biden to ink deals across the world.
Evidence and testimony uncovered by Comer's committee found that the Biden family collected millions of dollars from foreign sources. The "absolute wall" Biden described did not exist. Even some Democratic lawmakers have conceded that subsequent impeachment efforts targeting Trump have no realistic path forward, a tacit acknowledgment that the political ground has shifted.
Perhaps the most damaging document is a Nov. 22, 2016, email from George Kent to Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Kent, the same official who testified during impeachment proceedings, wrote privately that Hunter Biden's role at Burisma was undermining U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.
"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules."
Kent called Burisma's owner "a known corrupt figure" and said the company was "known for not playing by the rules." He acknowledged that Ukrainians saw a contradiction between America's anti-corruption lectures and the Biden family's financial entanglement with a suspect firm.
This email existed before the impeachment proceedings. It was not surfaced during them. Kent testified publicly in a way that supported the Democratic narrative. His private correspondence told a different story.
What emerges from the full documentary record is not a single error or an honest disagreement about policy. It is a pattern of selective disclosure. The whistleblower's bias was flagged, and hidden. Witness 2's inability to independently corroborate the complaint was documented, and buried. The interagency finding that Ukraine was making reform progress was written down, and ignored. Kent's private concerns about Hunter Biden were emailed to a U.S. ambassador, and never shared with the public during impeachment.
Democrats built the 2019 impeachment on a version of events that required the public not to see these documents. Now the documents are out. House Democrats have continued introducing measures targeting Trump, including 25th Amendment proposals with no realistic prospect of passage, but the factual foundation beneath their original impeachment case has eroded beyond repair.
The question Republicans are now asking is straightforward: if the impeachment vote was based on a record that key officials knew was incomplete, misleading, or contradicted by their own internal documents, should that vote stand?
Democrats have floated removal talk before without committing to action. The difference this time is that Republicans have the receipts, and the receipts don't match the story Democrats told.
When the government's own memos contradict the government's own witnesses, the problem isn't partisanship. It's accountability. And accountability doesn't come with an expiration date.
