September 24, 2026
Mr. Cohen submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
Impeaching Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Resolved,
That Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:
Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, against Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against him for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Sec. Article I: Undermining Democracy—Sowing Doubt in Elections
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States by repeatedly and knowingly spreading false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, soliciting and pressuring election officials to unlawfully alter election results in his favor, and by baselessly casting doubt on the security and accuracy of the 2026 midterm elections. In so doing, Donald J. Trump intentionally undermined public confidence in United States self-government and endeavored to delegitimize any unfavorable electoral outcome. These efforts were intended to unconstitutionally maintain elected office and unlawfully exercise governmental authority.
These persistent and deliberate efforts constitute a pattern of conduct. Time and time again, Federal agencies have independently concluded that the 2020 election was secure, perhaps the most secure in United States history. No credible evidence shows that foreign interference with election systems, or any irregularities or misconduct, compromised the integrity of the election and its results. Rather, evidence from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation demonstrated that Donald J. Trump was told directly, by his own senior advisors, and State and Federal election officials, that his repeated claims of a stolen election were false. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s evidence demonstrates Donald J. Trump knew these claims were false. Donald J. Trump continued his campaign of delegitimization by mocking and threatening those who exposed his baseless efforts to undermine confidence in the core infrastructure of our democracy.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On July 16, 2026, in an unprecedented address from the East Room of the White House, Donald J. Trump delivered remarks to the Nation which were designed to revive unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen and cast doubt on the security of the upcoming midterm elections. Citing purported shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure
, Donald J. Trump declassified and released documents alongside the speech. Those documents did not support his claims, and independent fact-checkers found he offered no evidence of the widespread fraud he alleged.
(2)
During that same address, Donald J. Trump threatened that broadcasters who declined to air his remarks should lose their licenses, further demonstrating that the speech was not a good-faith exercise in election security, but rather an effort to coerce favorable coverage, amplify falsehoods, and sow distrust in the integrity of our elections.
(3)
In repeating such false claims, Donald J. Trump knowingly perpetuates harassment, threats, and violence directed against election officials. Since 2016, when Donald J. Trump first appeared on the ballot for President of the United States and began alleging that elections were rigged against him, attacks on election officials and workers have grown markedly. A 2026 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found that a third of local election officials knew a colleague who had resigned at least in part out of fear for their safety or because of threats or intimidation, that a majority feared politically motivated interference with their work, and that nearly half were concerned about politically motivated investigations of themselves or their peers. Such conduct has chased experienced, nonpartisan election administrators from their posts and driven away civically minded volunteers alike, degrading the electoral infrastructure that Donald J. Trump claims he is trying to protect.
(4)
On January 28, 2026, at Donald J. Trump’s direction, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed a search warrant at the Fulton County, Georgia Election Hub and Operation Center in Union City, seizing physical ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls from the 2020 election in a county he lost and had baselessly accused of fraud for more than 5 years. Donald J. Trump dispatched Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, an official statutorily barred from participating in domestic law enforcement, whose office exists to coordinate and analyze foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, not to police United States ballot boxes, to Atlanta to personally oversee the search warrant execution. In that episode, Gabbard used her personal cellphone to call Donald J. Trump directly so that he could speak to the agents by speakerphone and personally thank them for their work. By turning an instrumentality of national security, one statutorily committed exclusively to foreign intelligence and counterintelligence work, toward the domestic seizure of ballots from a five-year-old, twice-certified election, Donald J. Trump demonstrated his willingness to turn the machinery of Federal intelligence and law enforcement against the ballot box itself whenever he refuses to accept a result.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump has undermined the peaceful transfer of power that is the foundation of United States constitutional democracy, sown distrust in the electoral process without factual basis, directed the instruments of Federal law enforcement and intelligence toward the physical seizure of ballots from an election already settled for half a decade, and laid the rhetorical and operational groundwork to contest any electoral outcome unfavorable to his party in advance of the 2026 midterm elections, all in contravention of the republican structure of government at the core of the United States Constitution that Donald J. Trump swore to protect and uphold.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article II: Abuse of Power—Waging War on Iran Without Congressional Approval
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and Article I of the Constitution, which vests in Congress alone the power to declare war, by ordering repeated military strikes against Iran without congressional authorization, in defiance of the War Powers Resolution and Congress’ votes directing the withdrawal of forces from hostilities with Iran.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On June 21 to 22, 2025, Donald J. Trump ordered coordinated strikes by B–2 bombers and cruise missiles against 3 major Iranian nuclear sites (Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan) without first seeking or obtaining congressional authorization for the use of military force, and without the 60 day notice-and-authorization process required by the War Powers Resolution.
(2)
In response, bipartisan majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed War Powers Resolutions in June 2026, directing the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran absent explicit congressional authorization. This marked the first time both chambers ever passed such a resolution directing a President to withdraw forces from a war zone under the Act. Donald J. Trump disregarded this unprecedented bicameral, bipartisan rebuke, and in so doing usurped Congress’ war-making authority.
(3)
After a brief pause in active hostilities, Donald J. Trump resumed strikes against Iran on July 7, 2026, notifying Congress only after the fact and asserting that the 60 day clock restarted with each new round of strikes. This flawed and disingenuous interpretation was designed to permit indefinite unilateral warfare while nominally complying with the Act’s notice requirement. The pattern was intended to evade compliance, not respect the Constitution’s structure or Federal law.
(4)
Article I, section 8 of the Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress alone, and no statute extends to strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities or the sustained bombing campaign that followed. Donald J. Trump refused to identify any specific congressional authorization for the June 2025 strikes or their July 2026 resumption, relying instead on his assertion that Article II provides authority to commit the Nation to war. Such a reading purposefully disregards the plain words of the Constitution and centuries of constitutional practice that Donald J. Trump swore to protect and uphold.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump has arrogated to himself the power to initiate and continue war against a foreign nation, a power the Framers deliberately withheld from a single individual and vested exclusively in Congress, and has disregarded the considered judgment of both chambers of Congress that hostilities should end.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article III: Abuse of Power—Extrajudicial Killings in International Waters of Venezuela
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the laws of the United States by ordering and directing the United States military to conduct dozens of lethal strikes against small vessels in international waters, killing well over 100 people without charge, trial, or any judicial process, based on the President’s own unilateral and largely unverified assertions that the occupants were drug traffickers or narcoterrorists
. As President of the United States, Donald J. Trump is bound by the Constitution and laws of the United States and international treaty obligations, including the right to due process, Congress’ authority to regulate the military, and the law of war.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
Beginning September 2, 2025, Donald J. Trump ordered a strike that killed all 11 people aboard a vessel he described on Truth Social as carrying narcoterrorists
. Over the following months, the Administration carried out dozens of additional strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing more than 100 people, without any of the victims having been charged with a crime, brought before a court, or afforded any opportunity to contest the Government’s characterization of them, the hallmarks of due process.
(2)
These strikes constituted extrajudicial killings, in direct contravention of international and domestic law, carried out against unidentified individuals in international waters, without any imminent threat to the United States or its Armed Forces, without warning or opportunity to surrender, and without any subsequent judicial or independent review of the Government’s basis for the killings. The President’s only public justification consisted of repeating his own prior assertions, not evidence subject to the scrutiny the Constitution requires.
(3)
A senior White House official publicly acknowledged that the strikes were also intended to help topple the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, contradicting the Administration’s official justification that the strikes were a narrow anti-narcotics operation and confirming that Donald J. Trump used lethal military force as an instrument of war without congressional authorization.
(4)
This campaign of extrajudicial killing culminated in the January 3, 2026, seizure of Maduro himself from his residence in Caracas and his forcible transport to New York to face trial, an operation conducted entirely on the President’s unilateral authority, without any congressional debate or authorization for the use of force inside sovereign Venezuelan territory.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump has claimed for himself the power to order the death of individuals, United States citizens and foreign alike, based solely on his own say-so, without charge or judicial process. Such authority to unilaterally deprive an individual of life is fundamentally incompatible with the constitutional guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article IV: Abuse of Power—Deploying Military Forces Against United States Cities
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by deploying National Guard troops and active-duty Marines into Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, and other United States cities over the objection of their elected governors and mayors, unlawfully using the military as a domestic police force against United States citizens in service of his political agenda.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
In June 2025, Donald J. Trump federalized California’s National Guard and deployed approximately 4,000 troops and 700 Marines into Los Angeles over the objection of Governor Gavin Newsom, in response to protests against immigration enforcement. A Federal judge ultimately ordered control of the California National Guard returned to Governor Newsom, and a Federal appellate court upheld that ruling, confirming that the deployment exceeded the President’s lawful authority.
(2)
Donald J. Trump sought to expand these deployments to Chicago and Portland, prompting the Supreme Court, in a ruling issued during Christmas week in 2025, to deny his request to immediately deploy the National Guard to Chicago, a rebuke that the President nonetheless characterized publicly as no impediment to his broader agenda of using United States cities as what he separately described as training grounds
for the military.
(3)
In Washington, DC, Donald J. Trump exploited the District’s unique Federal status to keep approximately 2,600 National Guard troops patrolling city streets through the end of 2026, an occupation that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, totaled roughly $496,000,000 across all city deployments through December 2025 alone.
(4)
These deployments have had deadly consequences. Two West Virginia National Guard members deployed to Washington, DC, under Donald J. Trump’s order were shot near the White House the day before Thanksgiving 2025 and one of them, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, age 20, died of her injuries.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump has used the Armed Forces of the United States as an instrument of domestic political control, in contravention of our laws and the traditions of our democracy, deploying troops into United States cities against the wishes of their elected leaders, at grave cost to taxpayers and, in at least 1 case, at the cost of a soldier’s life.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article V: Violation of Oath—The Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution by issuing, on his first day in office, an Executive order purporting to strip citizenship from children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or present on a temporary basis, in direct contravention of the plain text of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and more than a century of settled constitutional understanding.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed an Executive order declaring that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are not subject to the jurisdiction
of the United States and therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship, notwithstanding that the 14th Amendment states plainly that [a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States
.
(2)
Within days, Federal courts across the country in Washington, Maryland, and New Hampshire among other jurisdictions issued emergency orders blocking the directive as inconsistent with the 14th Amendment. The first court to rule on the order found it to be a blatant violation of the Constitution. The order never took effect anywhere in the United States at any point during the year and a half between its issuance and the Supreme Court’s final ruling, because it was enjoined by every single court that examined it. Such an unbroken, unanimous judicial record, across multiple Federal districts and every level of the Federal judiciary up through the Supreme Court itself, demonstrates that the order was clearly unlawful from its inception. Despite this, Donald J. Trump intentionally and unconstitutionally used the executive authority of the President in an attempt to override the Constitution he swore to uphold.
(3)
On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, struck down the Executive order by a 6 to 3 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment. Even Justice Kavanaugh, who dissented from the constitutional holding, agreed that the order violated Federal law.
(4)
Rather than accept this landmark defeat as confirmation that his order was unlawful from its inception, Donald J. Trump signed 2 new Executive orders on August 6, 2026, one purporting to exclude further categories of children born in the United States from automatic citizenship, and a second directing the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to deny visas and entry to individuals suspected of traveling to the United States for the purpose of giving birth each described by the Administration as protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship
. Asked whether the new orders would survive the constitutional scrutiny the first had not, Donald J. Trump said only, I think it will
, notwithstanding that the Supreme Court’s decision 6 weeks earlier had already held that unilateral executive fiat cannot narrow the 14th Amendment’s guarantee, and that any narrowing of that guarantee is a legislative and judicial function, not an executive one.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump attempted to rewrite by executive decree a constitutional guarantee that has defined United States citizenship since the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and pursued that effort for a year and a half after being told by every court to examine it that his order was unconstitutional, and then, within weeks of a unanimous rebuke from the Nation’s highest court, attempted the same maneuver again.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article VI: Abuse of Power—Canceling Federal Grants to Punish States for Their Votes
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath, the First Amendment’s protection of political rights, and the equal protection guarantees of the Fifth Amendment by directing Federal agencies to cancel billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated grants and disaster and public safety funding based solely on whether a State’s electoral votes went to his 2024 opponent. In so doing, Donald J. Trump attempted to usurp Congress’ spending authority and weaponize the machinery of Federal spending against United States citizens based solely on their political affiliation, the very association and expression the First Amendment exists to protect.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On October 1, 2025, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced on social media that the Administration would cancel clean-energy grants in 16 States that had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and the Department of Energy went on to terminate 284 grants worth approximately $7,500,000,000. In sworn court filings, the Department of Energy later admitted the terminations were based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s State
and that comparable grants in States that voted for Donald J. Trump were not terminated.
(2)
On January 12, 2026, United States District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that this scheme violated the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, holding that the Administration’s own admitted basis for the terminations the political composition of a State’s congressional delegation bears no rational relationship to any legitimate governmental purpose, and that the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause forbids the executive branch from distributing congressionally appropriated funds according to a citizenry’s voting behavior.
(3)
The Department of Homeland Security separately announced it would withhold 20 percent of Federal disaster and public safety grants, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it would withhold terrorism-prevention funding, from States that declined to hand over unredacted voter rolls to the Administration conditioning public safety funding for millions of United States citizens on States’ submission to an unrelated, politically motivated demand.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump directed the corruption of the Federal grantmaking process into an instrument of political retribution against entire States and the millions of United States citizens who live in them, conditioning the receipt of Federal funds Congress appropriated for the public benefit on whether a State’s electorate voted for him. Such use of public funds is so egregious and capricious that a Federal court has already found it unconstitutional, with no legitimate governmental purpose other than punishing citizens for how their neighbors voted.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article VII: Abuse of Power—Imposing Loyalty Tests on the Federal Workforce
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by firing Federal employees for the perception of disloyalty or for having worked on disfavored activities, including investigating or prosecuting Donald J. Trump’s own prior conduct. Further, Donald J. Trump directed the reclassification of thousands of career civil servants as at-will employees subject to removal for insufficient personal loyalty, and directed Federal job applicants to answer questions demonstrating fealty to his administration’s policies, undermining the nonpartisan civil service that Congress established by law to protect the government from political patronage.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On January 31, 2025, at the direction of Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, the Department of Justice fired approximately 40 prosecutors in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, who had worked on cases arising from the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and demanded that the FBI supply the names of potentially thousands of agents and employees who had supported those investigations. Days later, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bove ordered more than a half-dozen senior FBI executives to retire or be fired, and Donald J. Trump publicly stated that agents who had worked on the January 6th investigations or on the criminal cases previously brought against him would be fired, asserting without evidence that they were corrupt
and pledging the firings would be done quickly and very surgically
. Nine FBI agents sued to block release of the list, arguing that firing employees for the cases to which they had been assigned would be unlawful and retaliatory.
(2)
On February 7, 2025, Donald J. Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, the Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Special Counsel the independent agency charged with protecting Federal employees and whistleblowers from unlawful personnel actions, notwithstanding that Federal law permits his removal only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, none of which the Administration asserted. Around the same time, Donald J. Trump removed Cathy Harris, a Democratic member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, the body with exclusive jurisdiction over Federal employees’ appeals of unlawful firings, leaving the Board without the quorum it needed to function. A Federal district court found Dellinger’s removal unlawful and ordered him reinstated, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed that ruling and permitted the removal to take effect while litigation continued, disabling, in the interim, the very institutions Congress created to check the unlawful firing of Federal employees Donald J. Trump was simultaneously carrying out government-wide.
(3)
In the first weeks of his second term, Donald J. Trump’s Department of Justice gave a group of senior career attorneys, including section chiefs from the Environment and Natural Resources Division and senior leaders of the Civil Rights and National Security Divisions, an ultimatum to resign, or accept reassignment to a newly created Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group
with no litigation authority and no substantive legal work. The reassignments were executed before Attorney General Pam Bondi’s confirmation specifically to avoid a Federal ethics guideline requiring a 120-day moratorium on such transfers after new agency leadership takes office. Attorneys assigned to the group were given only menial research tasks and were not permitted to communicate with the lawyers actually litigating sanctuary-city cases. Every attorney assigned to the group ultimately resigned, one former section chief describing the assignment as a sham
in which we did very little
.
(4)
On June 3, 2026, Donald J. Trump signed an Executive order stripping job protections from an estimated 8,000 senior Federal employees, converting them into a new Schedule Policy/Career
category of at-will workers who can be fired without cause, a revival of the Schedule F
scheme first proposed in his first term, under which employees may be removed for declining to carry out the President’s personal directives rather than for any deficiency in the performance of their statutory duties.
(5)
The Administration’s own Office of Personnel Management director acknowledged in public remarks that the new category exists precisely so employees who do not carry out the President’s directives can be removed effectively at-will
.
(6)
In June 2025, the Administration unveiled a new Merit Hiring Plan
for Federal job applicants that included essay questions asking candidates to identify their favorite Donald J. Trump policy or Executive order, a screening criterion bearing no relationship to the merit-based qualifications the civil service laws require, and one designed instead to measure an applicant’s personal fealty to the President before that applicant is ever permitted to take the oath of office, which by law runs to the Constitution alone.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump sought to convert a professional, nonpartisan civil service accountable to law into a corps of political loyalists accountable to him personally, contrary to the merit system Congress established more than a century ago precisely to prevent this form of executive abuse.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article VIII: Disregard of Courts—The Alien Enemies Act and the Case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and defied binding orders of the Federal judiciary, including a unanimous Supreme Court order, by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport hundreds of individuals to a Salvadoran prison without due process, and by refusing for months to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man the government itself admitted was deported in error.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On March 15, 2025, Donald J. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute last used to justify the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals during World War II, to deport 137 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, along with 101 other Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man with a standing immigration court order barring his removal to that country. This occurred in direct opposition to a Federal judge’s clear order to halt the deportation flights and, if necessary, turn the airplanes around while still in the air. The Administration proceeded regardless.
(2)
The Department of Justice conceded in court filings that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of an administrative error
, yet the Administration refused for months to facilitate his return despite a district court order and a unanimous Supreme Court ruling directing it to do so. The Administration’s litigating position that once a person has been removed from the United States, no court retains power to order the correction of an admittedly erroneous removal would, if accepted, permit the executive branch to place any person, including a United States citizen, beyond the reach of judicial review simply by acting before a court can intervene.
(3)
Evidence gathered by journalists and advocacy organizations later showed that most of the men sent to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act proceeding faced no specific allegations of gang membership or criminal activity, and that men held there were held entirely incommunicado, without access to lawyers or family, for months.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump used a wartime statute intended for actual foreign combatants to strip hundreds of people, including at least 1 man his own Department of Justice admitted was innocent of any wrongdoing, of due process protections guaranteed by the Constitution, and then defied the orders of the very courts charged with correcting the error.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article IX: Violation of Oath—Cruel and Unusual Punishment at CECOT
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by knowingly consigning hundreds of deportees, including individuals with no criminal record, to indefinite and incommunicado detention in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a facility notorious for abuse, and by paying the Government of El Salvador millions of dollars to hold them beyond the reach of United States courts.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
The United States Government paid the Government of El Salvador approximately $6,000,000 to detain deportees at CECOT, a mega-prison built specifically to hold suspected gang members under a state of emergency that has suspended ordinary due process protections within El Salvador itself.
(2)
Sworn court filings submitted on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s family described severe physical abuse he suffered while held at CECOT, and reporting found that men sent there were held with no access to lawyers, family members, or the outside world for months, with writs of habeas corpus filed on their behalf in Salvadoran courts going unanswered.
(3)
The arrangement was designed, and Administration officials acknowledged as much in litigation, specifically to place deportees beyond the jurisdiction of United States courts as an explicit strategy to evade the constitutional protections against arbitrary and indefinite detention that apply to any person within the custody or control of the United States Government, regardless of where that custody is physically located.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump knowingly subjected human beings, including people his own administration admitted were wrongfully deported, to indefinite detention without charge in a foreign prison notorious for abuse, financed with United States taxpayer dollars and designed specifically to place them beyond the protection of United States law.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article X: Violation of Oath—Unlawful Withholding of Appropriated Funds and Dismantling of Congressionally Established Programs
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed by directing Federal agencies, across dozens of programs, to withhold, delay, or refuse to spend funds that Congress had lawfully appropriated, and by unilaterally dismantling Government functions and programs that only Congress has the authority to eliminate.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed an Executive order establishing the United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Service within the Executive Office of the President, an entity with no basis in any statute Congress enacted, and directed it to access the payment and data systems of, and impound funds appropriated to, agencies across the Federal Government. DOGE moved within weeks to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) entirely, freezing all of its disbursements, placing thousands of employees on leave, and attempting to fold its remaining functions into the State Department without any congressional action authorizing the agency’s elimination. A Federal judge found the shutdown likely unlawful, and the Supreme Court ultimately ordered billions of dollars in frozen USAID payments released to contractors owed the money. DOGE personnel separately seized access to the internal systems of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency created by Congress, after the agency’s acting director halted its funding and ordered staff to stop performing any work tasks
, an attempt to shutter by administrative fiat an agency that only Congress has the power to eliminate. DOGE undertook similar actions against the United States African Development Foundation and the Inter-American Foundation, both created by Congress, cancelling grants and contracts and reducing the former agency’s staff to a single employee.
(2)
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office repeatedly found the Administration in violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 across multiple agencies and programs, including a May 2025 finding that the Department of Transportation illegally delayed spending on electric-vehicle charging infrastructure required by law, and a July 2025 finding that the Department of Energy illegally withheld funding for the Renew America’s Schools Program benefiting Kindergarten through 12th grade schools nationwide.
(3)
The Government Accountability Office similarly found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency violated the Impoundment Control Act by improperly withholding or delaying congressionally appropriated disaster-preparedness funding funds Congress had already determined should reach United States communities preparing for the next emergency, withheld instead based on the Administration’s disagreement with Congress’ spending priorities rather than any statutory basis for delay.
(4)
Independent budget analysis found that by July 2025, the Administration had significantly delayed spending across 24 Federal accounts well beyond the specific programs it had formally proposed for rescission, concentrated precisely in the programs the Administration had separately targeted for elimination evidence of a deliberate strategy to starve disfavored programs of funds Congress had already appropriated rather than seeking Congress’ approval to cut them.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump substituted his own budgetary preferences for the considered judgment of Congress, denying United States citizens services and protections that their elected representatives had funded through the constitutionally prescribed appropriations process, and did so repeatedly even after nonpartisan investigators found the practice unlawful.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XI: Abuse of Power—Obstructing the Lawful Appointment of United States Attorneys
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the separation of powers by engineering a series of maneuvers to install his personal loyalists as United States Attorneys in defiance of the appointments clause and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, after Federal judges exercised their statutory authority to decline extending those loyalists’ interim terms.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
In New Jersey, after Federal judges declined to extend interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba’s (Habba) term and instead selected career prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Grace within hours, and the Administration executed a multi-step maneuver withdrawing Habba’s Senate nomination, having her resign, and then reappointing her as a Special Attorney
, specifically designed to evade the judges’ decision and the Senate confirmation process altogether.
(2)
On December 1, 2025, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a ruling disqualifying Habba, finding that the Administration’s maneuver was plainly prohibited
by Federal law and would, if permitted, allow any Special Attorney to avoid the gauntlet of presidential appointment and Senate confirmation and serve as the de facto U.S. Attorney indefinitely
. The court observed that the Administration’s approach effectively would permit anyone to fill the U.S. Attorney role indefinitely
.
(3)
The same unlawful appointment mechanism was used in the Eastern District of Virginia to install Lindsey Halligan, a former Donald J. Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, as interim United States Attorney after the sitting United States Attorney resigned under pressure for questioning the sufficiency of the evidence against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A Federal judge subsequently dismissed the indictments Halligan had obtained, ruling that she had no lawful authority to present the indictment
.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump repeatedly circumvented the constitutional and statutory processes governing the appointment of United States Attorneys in order to install personally loyal prosecutors, including his own former personal lawyers, in positions of prosecutorial power over his political adversaries, defying Federal courts each time they intervened to enforce the law.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XII: Abuse of Power—Defying Court Orders in Immigration Enforcement
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by directing Federal officials to disregard binding orders of Federal courts in the conduct of immigration enforcement. Under Article III of the Constitution, the judiciary alone possesses the power to say what the law is in a case or controversy properly before it, and a Federal court’s judgment, once entered, is final and binding on the parties, including the executive branch, unless and until it is reversed on appeal by a higher court. The executive branch possesses no constitutional authority to disregard, evade, or outrun a Federal court’s order because compliance is inconvenient or because the government disagrees with the court’s reasoning.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On March 15, 2025, even after United States District Judge James Boasberg orally ordered that deportation flights bound for El Salvador be turned around while still in the air, the Administration allowed the flights to proceed and complete the deportations, and the Department of Justice appealed the underlying order the same day rather than complying with it. On April 16, 2025, in a 46 page order, Judge Boasberg found probable cause to hold the Government in criminal contempt, writing that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt
, and adding that he did not reach that conclusion lightly or hastily
, having given the Government ample opportunity to rectify or explain its actions
, none of which had been satisfactory
. Judge Boasberg, an appointee of President Obama, who had earlier been nominated to the local DC courts by President George W. Bush, wrote directly to the constitutional stakes of the Government’s conduct: The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders, especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it
.
(2)
In the related case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, United States District Judge Paula Xinis found that the Administration’s response to her discovery orders filed after the Supreme Court had unanimously directed the Government to facilitate his return, reflects a deliberate evasion of their fundamental discovery obligations
, and that the Government’s failure to respond can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance
, citing a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations
. Judge Xinis further found that the Administration had engaged in a continued mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s Order
by claiming, contrary to the Order’s plain terms, that it had not been directed to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody.
(3)
When the Administration sought emergency appellate relief from Judge Xinis’ orders, a unanimous 3 judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, including a Reagan appointee writing for a panel that also included appointees of Presidents Clinton and Obama, rejected the Government’s position in terms rarely used by a Federal appellate court about the conduct of the executive branch. The panel wrote that the Government was asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order
, and that its position, that having rid itself of custody there was nothing further it could do, should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear
.
(4)
The pattern across these cases proceeding with deportations while a court’s order to halt them was still pending, and asserting that removal from the country moots any judicial power to order return, reflects a considered litigating strategy, repeated across multiple cases and multiple courts, of treating compliance with judicial orders as optional whenever speed can place the Government’s action beyond the court’s practical ability to undo it. That this strategy has drawn findings of willful disregard, bad faith, and deliberate evasion from Federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties, and a rebuke from a unanimous, ideologically mixed appellate panel, confirms that this is not a case of good-faith legal disagreement about the scope of a court’s authority, but a deliberate course of conduct in defiance of it.
(5)
The Administration’s posture in these cases asserting that once a person has been removed from the United States, courts lack power to order their return regardless of the legality of the removal, would, if accepted, permit the executive branch to place any person, including an United States citizen, beyond the reach of judicial review simply by acting quickly enough.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump has treated the orders of Article III as optional constraints to be evaded through speed and procedural gamesmanship rather than as binding law, conduct that Federal judges appointed by Presidents of both parties have found, in their own binding rulings, to be willful, made in bad faith, and undertaken with deliberate intent to evade compliance. This is not a case in which the House of Representatives must characterize the Administration’s conduct as defiance, the courts vested with the constitutional authority to make that determination have already made it, repeatedly, and the Administration’s response has been to continue the conduct those courts condemned. It strikes at the fundamental premise of a government of separated powers in which no branch, including the executive, is the final judge of its own authority.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XIII: Abolishing a Congressionally Mandated Agency—The Department of Education
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by directing the Secretary of Education to dismantle the Department of Education, an agency created by Congress in 1979, notwithstanding that only Congress possesses the authority to abolish a Federal department it has established by statute.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On March 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed an Executive order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education
, stating at the signing ceremony that he hoped she would be our last Secretary of Education
and that his administration would take all lawful steps to shut down the Department
.
(2)
The Department of Education was created by Congress through the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979, a statute duly enacted through bicameralism and presentment, as a matter of basic constitutional structure, an agency created by an Act of Congress can be abolished only by another Act of Congress, since the President’s unilateral authority extends to the execution of the laws, not their repeal. No such repealing legislation was ever enacted. The Senate never took up, let alone passed, legislation abolishing the Department.
(3)
Notwithstanding this settled constitutional limitation, the Administration proceeded to redistribute the Department’s core functions, including Federal student loan administration and special-education services, to other agencies such as the Small Business Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, effectively achieving through Executive fiat much of what Congress alone is empowered to accomplish through legislation.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump sought to eliminate, by his own hand, a cabinet department that Congress created and that only Congress can lawfully abolish, substituting unilateral executive action for the legislative process the Constitution requires for the elimination of institutions Congress has established.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XIV: Violation of Oath—Unlawful Mass Termination of Inspectors General Without Statutory Notice to Congress
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended, by summarily firing at least 17 Senate-confirmed Inspectors General across the Federal Government on his fifth day in office, without the 30 days advance notice to Congress or the case-specific reasons for removal that Federal law requires, disabling, before his administration had completed its second week, the independent watchdogs Congress created specifically to detect waste, fraud, and abuse within the very agencies Donald J. Trump now controls.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On the night of January 24, 2025, the White House Presidential Personnel Office notified at least 17, and by some counts 18, Inspectors General across major cabinet departments and agencies including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, State, and Veterans Affairs, that they were terminated effective immediately. The Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended by the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, requires the President to communicate to Congress, in writing, 30 days before removing or transferring an Inspector General, a substantive rationale including detailed, case-specific reasons for the removal. No such notice was given to Congress, and no case-specific reason was given to any of the Inspectors General removed.
(2)
Hannibal Mike
Ware, the Inspector General for the Small Business Administration and chairperson of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, wrote to the White House that same night warning that the removals appeared unlawful because the required notice period had been ignored, and recommending that the White House consult its own counsel before proceeding. The removals proceeded regardless.
(3)
On January 28, 2025, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Committee’s Democratic ranking member, jointly wrote to Donald J. Trump demanding the legally required explanation for the firings, stating that the communication to Congress must contain more than just broad and vague statements
and must assure Congress and the public that the termination is due to real concerns about the Inspector General’s ability to carry out their mission
. No adequate response was ever provided. This bipartisan demand issued by the chairman and ranking member of the committee with direct jurisdiction over the firings, within days of the terminations, stands as a contemporaneous, formal record that both parties in Congress recognized the firings as a violation of law at the time they occurred, not merely in retrospect.
(4)
Eight of the fired Inspectors General sued in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. On September 24, 2025, United States District Judge Ana C. Reyes ruled that the firings violated the Inspector General Act’s notice requirement and were therefore unlawful, though she declined to order the Inspectors General reinstated, reasoning that Donald J. Trump retained the underlying power to remove them and would likely simply fire them again after belatedly providing the legally required notice a ruling that confirmed the illegality of Donald J. Trump’s conduct while illustrating the practical difficulty of enforcing Congress’ oversight prerogatives against a President determined to evade them.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump gutted, in a single night and without any of the process Congress required, the independent oversight apparatus that exists specifically to detect and report waste, fraud, and abuse within the agencies of the executive branch, disabling, at the very outset of his term, the mechanism by which Congress and the public would otherwise have been positioned to learn of the misconduct catalogued throughout the other articles of this resolution, and doing so over the contemporaneous, bipartisan objection of the chairman and ranking member of the Senate committee charged with overseeing exactly this conduct.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XV: Unlawfully and Unilaterally Taxing United States Citizens Through Emergency Powers Tariffs
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and Article I of the Constitution, which vests the power to lay and collect taxes and duties exclusively in Congress, by imposing sweeping tariffs on nearly all goods imported into the United States under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act which does not authorize the President to impose tariffs at all.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
Beginning February 1, 2025, Donald J. Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China, and on April 2, 2025, a day the Administration itself dubbed Liberation Day
, declared a further emergency to impose sweeping reciprocal tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world, notwithstanding that in nearly 50 years, no president had ever invoked that statute to impose a tariff.
(2)
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, ruled 6 to 3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs at all. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Roberts explained that accepting Donald J. Trump’s interpretation would give the President power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs
, unconstrained by any of the procedural limits Congress built into the Nation’s actual tariff statutes.
(3)
Independent economists estimated that the invalidated tariffs had already extracted between $175,000,000,000 and $179,000,000,000 from United States businesses and consumers a sum exceeding the combined annual budgets of the Department of Transportation and the Department of Justice, collected without a single vote of the Congress in which the Constitution vests the taxing power.
(4)
Rather than accept the Supreme Court’s ruling as a rebuke, Donald J. Trump, within hours of the decision, proclaimed a new 10 percent global tariff under a different statute and announced his intention to raise it further within days, demonstrating that his tariff program was never a response to a genuine emergency but a standing assertion of a taxing power the Constitution does not give him.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump imposed what amounted to a nationwide tax increase on United States citizens without the consent of their elected representatives in Congress, using an emergency statute that the Nation’s highest court unanimously agreed does not authorize taxation, and persisted in asserting that same taxing power through new statutory pretexts immediately after being told by the Supreme Court that he did not have it.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XVI: Abuse of Power—Political Prosecutions of Comey, James, and Schiff
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by directing the Department of Justice to pursue criminal prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey (Comey), New York Attorney General Letitia James (James), and Senator Adam Schiff (Schiff), 3 of his most prominent political adversaries, in a manner so factually dubious that a grand jury itself refused to approve the full indictment presented against Comey, forcing the prosecutor to circumvent that refusal rather than accept it, and so legally deficient and procedurally irregular that the resulting indictments were dismissed by the courts.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On September 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump posted publicly demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecute Comey, James, and Schiff by name. Days later, Erik Siebert, the sitting interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned under pressure after concluding the evidence against Comey and James was insufficient to charge. The Administration then installed Lindsey Halligan, a former Donald J. Trump personal lawyer, who obtained the indictments Siebert had declined to seek.
(2)
On September 25, 2025, the grand jury considering the case against Comey rejected 1 of the 3 counts Halligan had presented. Rather than present a revised indictment to the full grand jury for its vote, Halligan simply reprinted an altered, 2 count version of the document and brought it to the grand jury foreperson alone to sign, without the remaining grand jurors ever reviewing or voting on the indictment in the form that was actually filed. Prosecutors confirmed this sequence of events in open court 2 months later, prompting Comey’s attorneys to move to dismiss the indictment on the ground that no valid grand jury had ever approved it.
(3)
A Federal judge dismissed the indictments against both Comey and James after finding that Halligan’s own appointment as interim United States Attorney was unlawful, and further criticized the prosecution for what the court called a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps
.
(4)
In the parallel investigation of Senator Schiff, prosecutors in the Maryland United States Attorney’s Office after months of investigation prompted by Donald J. Trump’s public demands, concluded they lacked sufficient evidence to bring charges, and the Justice Department’s own Inspector General subsequently opened an investigation into whether individuals had impersonated Federal agents while pursuing the mortgage-fraud theory the Administration had promoted against Schiff.
(5)
All 3 individuals targeted by name in Donald J. Trump’s public demand for prosecution, Comey, James, and Schiff, were prominent critics of Donald J. Trump who had each played a central role in investigating him or holding him accountable during his first term, with Comey as FBI Director during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, James as the New York Attorney General who obtained a civil fraud judgment against the Trump Organization, and Schiff as the lead House manager in Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment trial. The selection of these 3 specific individuals for prosecution, following Donald J. Trump’s own public identification of them by name, evidences a prosecutorial decision driven by personal and political enmity rather than by the independent judgment of career law enforcement, which in each instance had itself concluded that prosecution was not warranted.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump directed the machinery of Federal law enforcement against named political adversaries by public demand, installed unlawfully appointed prosecutors to pursue cases his own department’s career attorneys had declined, tolerated a prosecutor’s circumvention of a grand jury’s own refusal to approve the charges as presented, and pursued indictments that courts found were built on manufactured authority rather than evidence.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XVII: Abuse of Power—The IRS Settlement and the Corruption of the Judgment Fund
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and used his office for personal and political gain by directing his own Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit he had personally filed against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on terms that granted him and his family permanent immunity from tax examination and created a taxpayer-funded compensation fund for his political allies.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
In February 2025, Donald J. Trump filed a $10,000,000,000 lawsuit against the IRS an agency within the executive branch he leads, over the 2022 leak of his tax returns by a former IRS contractor who had already been criminally prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for that conduct.
(2)
In May 2026, his own Department of Justice agreed to settle that suit by creating a $1,776,000,000 fund, drawn from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, to compensate individuals, potentially including January 6th defendants, who claimed to have been wrongfully targeted by the prior administration, with commission members overseeing the fund removable by Donald J. Trump without cause. No statute authorizes the President or his Department of Justice to create a compensation fund of this kind or to draw on the Judgment Fund, which exists to pay court judgments and settlements of actual legal claims against the government, for the purpose of rewarding a self-selected class of the President’s political allies.
(3)
The same settlement included a provision, released by Donald J. Trump’s own Justice Department, that would have permanently and forever barred the IRS from conducting any examination of Donald J. Trump, his family members, or affiliated businesses a personal tax shield secured through a lawsuit he brought against the very government he heads.
(4)
Only after Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn threatened to withhold their votes on the nomination of Todd Blanche for Attorney General did the Administration agree to rescind the $1,800,000,000 political compensation fund.
(5)
On July 13, 2026, United States District Judge Kathleen Williams voided the settlement in its entirety, finding that Donald J. Trump’s lawsuit had never been a genuine adversarial proceeding, because Donald J. Trump controlled both the plaintiffs and the defendants and the Department of Justice and the IRS being agencies of his own administration, there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail
. The court found that Donald J. Trump and his sons, who joined the suit as coplaintiffs, had acted in bad faith and had brought the case for an improper purpose, to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy
for a settlement with no basis in law or fact, and referred Donald J. Trump’s attorneys, including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, for possible professional discipline.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump used the machinery of his own Department of Justice to convert a lawsuit he filed against his own government into a mechanism for both personal financial protection and the distribution of taxpayer funds to his political allies. In substance, the permanent bar on any IRS examination of himself, his family, and his businesses functioned as a self-granted pardon from future tax accountability, obtained not through the constitutional pardon power but through a collusive lawsuit against an agency he controls, an assertion that the President and his family stand above the law that a Federal court has since found was never a genuine legal proceeding at all.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XVIII: Abuse of Power—The Corrupt Use of the Pardon Power
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by using the pardon power to reward wealthy donors, business partners, and political allies whose clemency applications were tied to financial benefits flowing to Donald J. Trump personally or to businesses owned by his family, rather than to any traditional standard of justice, remorse, or rehabilitation.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On October 21, 2025, Donald J. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Bank Secrecy Act after his company admitted allowing more than a million and a half transactions that violated United States sanctions and facilitated money flows to terrorists and child abusers. The pardon came after Binance’s stablecoin partner completed a $2,000,000,000 investment in the Trump family’s own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and after a lobbyist personally pressed Donald J. Trump on Zhao’s pardon during an Oval Office meeting.
(2)
In December 2025, Donald J. Trump pardoned Timothy Leiweke, former CEO of Oak View Group, after his company had donated $250,000 to the Trump inaugural committee and his attorney a Donald J. Trump ally personally lobbied the President for leniency during a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago.
(3)
In January 2026, Donald J. Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini, a foreign billionaire facing bribery charges related to Puerto Rico’s governor, after Herrera Velutini’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, whose only prior political donation on record was 20 dollars, contributed $3,500,000 to a Donald J. Trump-aligned super PAC.
(4)
The proximity and sequence of these events a business relationship or financial benefit to Donald J. Trump or his family, followed by clemency for the very individual who provided it recurred across multiple pardons in a pattern inconsistent with the traditional standards the Department of Justice applies to clemency petitions, which examine the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility, conduct since conviction, and the interests of justice, not the applicant’s financial relationship to the President granting the pardon.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump transformed the constitutional pardon power, intended as an instrument of mercy and justice, into a marketplace in which wealthy donors, business partners, and allies could purchase clemency through political contributions and financial arrangements benefiting Donald J. Trump and his family personally. The implied exchange of financial benefit and political support for a pardon, effectively creating, for the individual who pays for it, a personal exception to the criminal law and to the ordinary processes of justice, is itself corrupt, and undermines the Constitution’s protections of political freedom and equal justice under the law.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XIX: Attacks on a Free Press—Banishing Reporters from the White House for Disfavored Coverage
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press by repeatedly stripping news organizations of access to the White House, the press pool, and the briefing room because of the content of their coverage, and by seizing control of the mechanism that determines how and which journalists may access the White House, notwithstanding the Constitution’s express limits on viewpoint discrimination in governmental action.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed an Executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America
. When the Associated Press announced it would continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico in its own reporting, the White House barred AP reporters from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other restricted press spaces beginning in February 2025. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden found that the exclusion seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination
and, on April 8, 2025, issued a preliminary injunction ordering AP's access restored; the administration appealed, and the D.C. Circuit stayed that ruling on June 6, 2025, and upheld the stay on July 22, 2025, leaving the ban in effect pending further litigation.
(2)
On February 25–26, 2025, the White House announced it would unilaterally seize control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents' Association, which had determined pool composition and questioning order for decades under every prior administration of both parties. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared not any more
, and Donald J. Trump himself stated, we're going to be now calling the shots
. WHCA President Eugene Daniels warned that the move meant the government will choose the journalists who cover the president
, and that in a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps
.
(3)
In October 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth imposed new Pentagon credentialing rules requiring reporters to obtain prior government authorization before seeking information from defense personnel, on pain of losing their press badges. Rather than accept a rule that Military Times and Defense News warned would punish reporters who ask legitimate questions
, at least thirty major news organizations including ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, the Associated Press, and NPR forfeited their Pentagon credentials in a unified act of professional conscience, leaving only outlets aligned with the administration inside the building. U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman struck the policy down as unconstitutional on March 20, 2026, and permanently enjoined it; the Pentagon's second attempt to impose materially similar restrictions was blocked in April 2026.
(4)
On the weekend of September 19–20, 2026, the White House revoked the press credentials of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico without notice or process, removing CNN from the pool rotation entirely and eliminating video coverage of the President for millions of Americans. Donald J. Trump stated the outlets were excluded because they only write negatively
about him and should not be allowed access
. CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued on September 21, 2026, alleging retaliatory viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment and a denial of due process under the Fifth Amendment, stating that without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists' credentials because it objected to our reporting
.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump has, over the course of nearly two years and against outlets spanning the ideological spectrum of the mainstream press, converted control over physical access to the presidency into a tool for punishing unfavorable coverage, a practice Federal courts have repeatedly and explicitly found unconstitutional, and one that strikes directly at the structural function a free press serves in a constitutional democracy: reporting on the government to the people it governs, without the government's permission as to what it may say.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XX: Attacks on a Free Press—Coercing CBS and ABC to Change Editorial Content
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press through 2 related courses of conduct, including filing a legally weak lawsuit against CBS News over ordinary editorial judgment and using his administration’s control over a pending multibillion-dollar merger to coerce a financial settlement from the network’s parent company, and directing the Department of Justice to subpoena journalists and their phone records in an effort to unmask the confidential sources behind news coverage the Administration found embarrassing or unflattering.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
Donald J. Trump filed a $20,000,000,000 lawsuit against CBS News alleging that its editing of a 60 Minutes
interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris was unlawful. The gravamen of the complaint was an ordinary editorial choice, which of two responses to the same question to air, a decision of the kind news organizations make daily and that has never before been treated as actionable outside the defamation context, which the complaint did not plead.
(2)
At the same time this lawsuit was pending, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, required approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) then chaired by a Donald J. Trump appointee for its multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance Media. On July 2, 2025, Paramount agreed to pay $16,000,000 toward Donald J. Trump’s future presidential library to settle the suit, a settlement Paramount’s own co-CEO stated was made to avoid jeopardizing the pending merger.
(3)
The FCC, under its Donald J. Trump-appointed chairman, opened a formal broadcast news distortion
investigation into CBS over the same interview underlying the lawsuit while the merger review remained pending, and approved the merger shortly after the settlement using the Commission’s licensing authority over the same set of facts underlying Donald J. Trump’s personal lawsuit, in a manner that placed a Federal agency’s regulatory leverage and the President’s personal litigation against the same company on the same timeline.
(4)
Paramount never permitted a court to rule on whether Donald J. Trump’s lawsuit or the FCC’s investigation were lawful. Rather, it settled before the merits of the case were challenged while its merger remained pending before the very agencies conducting them. That a company, while seeking regulatory approval for a major transaction, decided not to pay $16,000,000 and make editorial concessions over responding to a dubious legal claim reveals the coercive weight of the regulatory leverage Donald J. Trump’s administration held. The editorial changes demonstrate the exact chilling effect on press freedom the First Amendment exists to prevent.
(5)
In September 2025, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Donald J. Trump appointee, publicly threatened ABC and its network affiliates over comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s on-air remarks about the killing of Charlie Kirk, calling the remarks some of the sickest conduct possible
and warning broadcasters, we can do this the easy way or the hard way
, while suggesting there would be additional work for the FCC
if the network did not act. Within hours, ABC affiliate owners Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group both of which had business pending before the Commission announced they would preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and ABC itself suspended the show indefinitely that same day. Carr later denied that his threat had anything to do with the suspension, a denial Donald J. Trump publicly echoed, notwithstanding that Carr’s remarks, invoking his authority over the same broadcasters’ licenses, directly preceded ABC’s decision by hours.
(6)
In April 2026, the FCC ordered Disney’s ABC-owned television stations to file their broadcast license renewals ahead of the normal schedule, doing so amid an ongoing investigation into perceived bias on the ABC program The View
and a separate inquiry into Disney’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, and while more than 150,000 public comments many organized through campaigns encouraging the FCC to deny the licenses over the network’s news coverage flooded the resulting docket. On August 18, 2026, Disney and ABC sued the FCC, alleging that the early license review and the diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and The View
investigations amounted to retaliation for Kimmel’s suspension and ABC’s news coverage in violation of the First Amendment one of the most direct legal challenges any media company has brought against the Administration’s use of licensing authority to pressure broadcasters over content.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump used the machinery of litigation, the regulatory authority of an agency he controls, and the subpoena power of his own Department of Justice to extract a multimillion-dollar payment benefiting himself personally, force a late-night host off the air, place a major broadcaster’s licenses in jeopardy over disfavored commentary, and pressure news organizations over disfavored editorial coverage, a sustained campaign, spanning multiple news organizations and multiple courts, that chills the freedom of the press the First Amendment was written to protect, and that in every instance where a court was permitted to rule on the underlying subpoenas, resulted in the government abandoning them rather than defend their legality.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XXI: Violation of Oath—Free Speech and Retaliatory Executive Orders Against Law Firms
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the First Amendment by issuing a series of Executive orders targeting major United States law firms for retaliation, by stripping security clearances, terminating Federal contracts, and barring firm employees from Federal buildings, because those firms had represented his political adversaries or had employed lawyers he perceived as enemies.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On March 6, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed an Executive order targeting Perkins Coie LLP, suspending the security clearances of the entire firm’s employees, terminating Federal contracts with its clients, and barring its lawyers from Federal buildings, because the firm had represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and hired the research firm connected to the Steele dossier.
(2)
Donald J. Trump signed nearly identical orders against Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison on March 14, 2025, targeting a partner who had overseen a Manhattan investigation into Donald J. Trump’s business practices against Jenner and Block on March 25, 2025, and against WilmerHale on March 27, 2025, because of that firm’s association with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
(3)
On May 2, 2025, United States District Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of President Obama, permanently struck down the Perkins Coie order in a 102 page opinion, holding that the order violated the firm’s First Amendment rights of speech and association and constituted unlawful retaliation for its clients’ protected advocacy, and writing that [s]ettling personal vendettas by targeting a disliked business or individual for punitive government action is not a legitimate use of the powers of the U.S. Government or an American president
.
(4)
Every other firm that chose to litigate rather than capitulate won an identical result. On May 23, 2025, United States District Judge John Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush, struck down the order against Jenner and Block as unconstitutional, holding that it targeted the firm for what it has said and thereby attempts to dampen what it might yet say
. On May 27, 2025, United States District Judge Richard Leon also a Bush appointee struck down the order against WilmerHale, holding that it unlawfully used coercion to suppress WilmerHale’s representation of disfavored causes and clients
and that allowing it to stand would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers
. United States District Judge Loren AliKhan, an appointee of President Biden, ruled the same way in the case brought by Susman Godfrey.
(5)
Four different firms sued and 4 different judges, 2 appointed by Republican presidents, 2 by Democratic presidents, ruled unanimously that the orders were unconstitutional. Rather than pursue further appeals of this unbroken record, the Administration formally dismissed its pending appeals in all 4 cases, an affirmative concession that no court, of any composition, was prepared to sustain the orders’ constitutionality.
(6)
Each of these orders followed the same pattern, identify a firm associated with a specific piece of protected advocacy or representation the President found personally objectionable, and impose sanctions, loss of security clearances, loss of Federal contracts, and denial of access to Federal buildings, calibrated to threaten the firm’s ability to continue operating, rather than any sanction tied to a specific violation of professional conduct rules through the disciplinary processes that normally govern attorney conduct and in which the President has no constitutional role.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump attempted to use the coercive power of the presidency to punish lawyers for representing clients he disfavored and to intimidate the legal profession generally into declining to challenge his administration, an assault on the right to counsel and the freedom of association that 4 Federal judges, appointed by Presidents of both parties, unanimously found unconstitutional, a judicial verdict so one-sided that Donald J. Trump’s own Department of Justice ultimately conceded it rather than pursue further review.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XXII: Violation of Oath—Free Speech and Coercing Universities Through Withheld Federal Funds
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the First Amendment by directing Federal agencies to freeze billions of dollars in Federal research funding for universities, including Harvard University, as retaliation for those institutions’ protected speech and their refusal to submit to ideological demands regarding curriculum, hiring, and student discipline.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
Beginning in the spring of 2025, the Administration announced it was reviewing and then froze more than $2,200,000,000 in Federal research grants and $60,000,000 in contracts with Harvard University, purportedly over concerns about campus antisemitism, while simultaneously demanding sweeping changes to the university’s governance, hiring practices, and admissions screening of international applicants based on their political viewpoints regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(2)
On September 3, 2025, United States District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that the funding freeze was unconstitutional, finding that it constituted retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion
in violation of the First Amendment. The court found that the funding freeze was not tailored to any specific, individualized finding of civil-rights violations by Harvard but was instead used as leverage to compel sweeping changes to the university’s governance, hiring, and admissions practices unrelated to any adjudicated violation of law.
(3)
Facing the same pressure campaign, several other universities including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Brown University entered into settlement agreements with the Administration to restore their research funding, with Columbia alone agreeing to pay $220,000,000, demonstrating that the withholding of lawfully appropriated research funds functioned as leverage to extract ideological and financial concessions from United States academic institutions.
(4)
The Administration extended this campaign to public universities as well. In July 2025, the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation froze more than $500,000,000 in research grants to the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Administration proposed a $1,000,000,000 settlement to resolve claims that UCLA tolerated antisemitism and engaged in race-based admissions an arrangement Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration publicly characterized as extortion. UCLA declined to settle, and on September 22, 2025, United States District Judge Rita Lin found the funding freeze likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act and ordered the Government to restore approximately $500,000,000 in grants, a ruling that, together with the Harvard decision, extended the same constitutional finding to a public university system.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump directed the withholding of billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated research funding for cancer research and other work benefiting the United States public, as a coercive tool to punish universities for constitutionally protected speech and to compel ideological conformity, conduct a Federal court has already ruled unconstitutional.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XXIII: Abuse of Power—Demolishing the White House East Wing Without Congressional Approval
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and his duty as steward, not owner, of the White House by unilaterally demolishing the historic East Wing of the White House to construct a private ballroom, without seeking the congressional approval and independent commission review historically required for major alterations to the executive mansion. The Constitution vests in Congress alone the power to dispose of and make all needful rules respecting property belonging to the United States, and the White House, built with and maintained by public funds since 1800, is such property. No President possesses independent constitutional authority to demolish part of it and construct a replacement of his own design merely because he has arranged to pay for the construction himself.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
Beginning in October 2025, demolition crews razed the East Wing of the White House, the traditional office of the First Lady and a component of the executive mansion for more than a century, without first submitting construction plans to the National Capital Planning Commission or seeking congressional approval, notwithstanding that no improvement or alteration of this magnitude to the White House had occurred in more than 70 years.
(2)
The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to halt the project, alleging that the Administration skipped the legally mandated review processes and failed to seek congressional approval before beginning demolition. On March 31, 2026, United States District Judge Richard Leon ordered a halt to further above-ground construction absent congressional authorization, ruling that Donald J. Trump is a steward
of the White House for future generations, not its owner
, and that no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have
. Judge Leon permitted construction to continue only insofar as necessary for the safety and security of the White House, a carve-out that encompassed the underground bunker the Administration was simultaneously building beneath the site notwithstanding that the White House complex has included a hardened security bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, since it was first built during the Second World War and substantially expanded after 2001, raising the question of what additional security necessity a second, newly built bunker was intended to serve.
(3)
Despite that judicial order, the National Capital Planning Commission chaired by Will Scharf, a Donald J. Trump aide whom the President had appointed to head the Commission in July 2025 after firing several of its prior members, proceeded to grant final approval of the ballroom project days later, in a maneuver designed to evade rather than comply with the court’s ruling. Donald J. Trump named Scharf White House Counsel in August 2026, elevating to the position responsible for advising the President on the legality of his own conduct the same aide who had headed the commission that approved the ballroom project over the district court’s objection.
(4)
The cost of the project, initially estimated at $250,000,000, grew to an estimated $400,000,000 and, according to later reporting on contractor invoices, may exceed $600,000,000, as Donald J. Trump repeatedly enlarged its scope, with the White House itself acknowledging that public funds are being used for underground bunkers and security upgrades even as the President has claimed the project is entirely privately financed. Congress refused the Administration’s request for $1,000,000,000 in public funding for the project in May 2026, and Democratic members of Congress warned the following month that $350,000,000 in funds from an unrelated tax law appeared to have been redirected to pay for construction regardless.
(5)
On August 7, 2026, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed Judge Leon’s injunction, ordering that above-ground construction remain halted until Congress authorizes the project. The court wrote that each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House
, and rejected the Administration’s invocation of national-security justifications to excuse the demolition and construction, writing that such arguments are not an automatic get-out-of-law-free card
and that the bold assertion that the Executive can act with utter lawlessness, destroying treasured national landmarks and harming the interests of individuals, and that no court can stop it flouts our constitutional order
. The court further held that whether or not a massive ballroom should be constructed is for Congress to decide and is not a matter for Executive self-help
.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump unilaterally destroyed a historic component of the White House held in trust for United States citizens, evaded the review processes and congressional approval historically required for such alterations, used commissions of his own appointees to ratify the fait accompli after a Federal court had ordered construction halted, and then elevated the very aide who chaired that commission to the position of White House Counsel. Both the district court and, on appeal, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have now held that the project cannot proceed without congressional authorization Donald J. Trump has never sought.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XXIV: Violation of Oath—The Illegal Impoundment of Appropriated Funds
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and Article I’s vesting of the power of the purse in Congress by directing his Office of Management and Budget to withhold billions of dollars in appropriated funds through both formal rescission proposals and informal delay, in defiance of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. This conduct was not merely flagged by the Government Accountability Office as a legislative-branch legal opinion, but a Federal district court, applying the same statutes, independently reached the merits and held the withholding unlawful.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
In August 2025, Donald J. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, under Director Russell Vought, proposed a so-called pocket rescission
withholding funds from obligation so close to the end of the fiscal year that the funds would expire before Congress could act on the proposal, thereby achieving the cancellation of the spending without ever obtaining the affirmative congressional approval the Impoundment Control Act requires for a rescission to take effect.
(2)
On September 3, 2025, United States District Judge Amir Ali ruled on the merits that the Administration’s withholding of roughly $10,500,000,000 in appropriated foreign-assistance funding was unlawful, writing that [t]here is not a plausible interpretation of the statutes that would justify the billions of dollars they plan to withhold
, and entered a preliminary injunction ordering the funds obligated before they expired. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the Administration’s request to stay that injunction pending appeal, leaving the district court’s finding of illegality intact at every level of judicial review that reached the merits.
(3)
The Administration then sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court, and on September 26, 2025, Chief Justice Roberts granted a stay of the district court’s injunction but the Court’s order expressly stated that it reflected only the Court’s preliminary view, consistent with the standards for interim relief
, and that it should not be read as a final determination on the merits
. No court, at any stage of this litigation, ever held on the merits that the withholding was lawful. The only judge to reach the merits held that it was not.
(4)
The Government Accountability Office reached the same legal conclusion as Judge Ali through its own statutory review process, finding pocket rescissions of this kind inconsistent with the Impoundment Control Act’s legislative history and the constitutional separation of powers, and noting that no administration in nearly 50 years had attempted to execute one including Donald J. Trump’s own first-term OMB, which considered and rejected the tactic in 2018 and 2019 after the Government Accountability Office found it unlawful.
(5)
The scheme drew challenges from across the political spectrum specifically because it inverted the constitutional design, rather than seeking Congress’ approval to cancel spending it disfavored, as the Impoundment Control Act requires, the Administration used the mere passage of time to accomplish a de facto line-item veto the very device the Supreme Court held unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump asserted a power the Constitution reserves to Congress alone, the power to determine how appropriated funds are spent, and did so through a maneuver that the 1 court to reach the merits held unlawful, that no court ever upheld on the merits, and that the Government Accountability Office, applying the same statutory text, independently concluded violated the law of the land.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XXV: Abuse of Power—Self-Aggrandizement Through the Renaming of Public Institutions, Seizure of Cultural and Civic Property, and Personal Appropriation of National Currency
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath by using the powers of his office to attach his own name, likeness, and persona to institutions and property belonging to the United States people including, an independent congressionally chartered peace institute, the Nation’s foremost public performing arts center, the circulating currency of the United States, and, as detailed separately in Article XXII, the White House itself, in a sustained pattern of self-commemoration without precedent among his predecessors and squarely at odds with the republican tradition of reserving such honors, if any, for the dead and for institutions Congress alone may name.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
On February 19, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14217 declaring the United States Institute of Peace (Institute), an independent nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1984 specifically to insulate peacebuilding work from partisan politics, unnecessary
, and directed the termination of its entire board, its president, and most of its staff. When the Institute’s leadership refused to recognize the legitimacy of the takeover, personnel from the DOGE, accompanied by agents of the FBI and the DC. Metropolitan Police, forced their way into the Institute’s headquarters in March 2025, to physically seize the building. On May 19, 2025, United States District Judge Beryl Howell, the same judge who would later strike down Donald J. Trump’s retaliatory order against Perkins Coie, described in Article XX, ruled that the takeover had been carried out by illegitimately-installed leaders
and declared it, along with the purported transfer of the Institute’s building, null and void
. Notwithstanding that ruling, the Administration proceeded to transfer control of the building to the State Department, and in December 2025, renamed it the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace
, affixing Donald J. Trump’s name in large metal letters above the building’s original sign, a change the Administration’s own spokesperson said was intended to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our Nation’s history
, and used the building days later to host a foreign peace-deal signing ceremony.
(2)
On February 12, 2025, Donald J. Trump dismissed the Biden-appointed trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a national cultural institution Congress created by statute in 1958. The remaining, newly Donald J. Trump-appointed board then elected Donald J. Trump himself as chairman, the first time in the Center’s history that a sitting president had held that position, and fired the Center’s president of 11 years, installing a Donald J. Trump loyalist in her place. In December 2025, the board voted to rename the institution itself The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts
, notwithstanding that the Center’s establishing statute is itself an Act of Congress and that only Congress possesses the authority to rename a national memorial it has created. A member of Congress present for the vote stated afterward that she had been prevented from speaking before it was forced through. Republicans of the House of Representatives separately advanced a proposal, approved in committee, to rename the Center’s Opera House after First Lady Melania Trump.
(3)
Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex officio trustee of the Center, sued Donald J. Trump and the Center’s board on December 22, 2025, arguing that only Congress could rename an institution it had created by statute. On May 29, 2026, United States District Judge Christopher Cooper agreed, ruling in a 94 page opinion issued on President Kennedy’s birthday that the Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so
, and that Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it
. Judge Cooper ordered Donald J. Trump’s name removed from the building’s facade, its website, and all other signage, and separately restored Representative Beatty’s voting rights as a trustee, which the board had stripped from her. Rather than comply, the board initially covered the lettering with a tarp, and only removed the individual letters spelling Donald J. Trump’s name on June 12 and 13, 2026, after a Federal appeals court declined to stay the order. Weeks later, the board voted again this time to add the inscription Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump
beneath the Center’s name, prompting Representative Beatty to file a second emergency motion to block it. In an August 2026 filing opposing that motion, the Department of Justice warned that if Donald J. Trump were not permitted to attach his name to the Center in some form, the building would be left to deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down
. The Administration also publicly suggested that it might demolish the Kennedy Center itself rather than complete a renovation that did not bear Donald J. Trump’s name.
(4)
Beginning in 2025, Donald J. Trump directed a series of efforts to place his own image and name on the circulating currency and coinage of the United States, an honor traditionally reserved for the deceased. In September 2026, the United States Mint began circulating a gold-colored $1 coin bearing Donald J. Trump’s portrait, the first depiction of a sitting president on circulating United States currency in a century, and only the second in the Nation’s history. The Administration justified the coin under a 2020 statute authorizing special semiquincentennial coin designs, notwithstanding that the same statute bars the portrait of any living person from appearing on the coin’s reverse. The Administration’s response was to place Donald J. Trump’s portrait on the coin’s obverse instead, a placement one constitutional law scholar described as failing to change the fact that the law prohibits, currently, on currency, the likeness of any person, not just the President, who is alive
. Separately, the Treasury Department announced that Donald J. Trump’s own signature would appear on paper currency for the first time by a sitting president, and Treasury Department officials prepared design mock-ups of a $250 bill bearing Donald J. Trump’s portrait and signature, notwithstanding an 1866 law, enacted after a nearly identical controversy involving a Treasury Department official’s portrait on a 5-cent note, that flatly bars any living person’s likeness from appearing on United States currency. That bill has not been authorized or issued. A member of Congress has introduced legislation to override the 1866 law for the specific purpose of permitting it.
(5)
As detailed in Article XXII, Donald J. Trump separately directed the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing to construct a ballroom of his own design, a project 2 Federal courts have now held cannot proceed without the congressional authorization he has never sought. Considered together with the seizure and renaming of the Institute of Peace, the capture and renaming of the Kennedy Center, and the campaign to place his likeness on the Nation’s money, the East Wing demolition is not an isolated act of poor judgment about historic preservation but 1 more instance of the same underlying pattern, the substitution of Donald J. Trump’s personal name, image, and preferences for the institutions, property, and money that belong to United States citizens and that the Constitution and Congress, not the President alone, are entrusted to name, govern, and preserve.
(6)
Congress created the Commission of Fine Arts in 1910, and the National Capital Planning Commission in 1952, for the specific purpose of subjecting major changes to the design of the Nation’s capital to disinterested, expert review, insulated from the preferences of any single officeholder. Donald J. Trump defeated that purpose not by ignoring the review process outright but by first staffing both bodies entirely with his own appointees, so that the independent review Congress intended became, in substance, advisory to himself. Beginning in October 2025, Donald J. Trump proposed a 250-foot Triumphal Arch
, modeled on the Arc de Triomphe and taller than the Lincoln Memorial, to be built at Memorial Circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, on a sightline Congress and the National Park Service have preserved for more than a century to honor the Nation’s Civil War dead. His own appointees on the Commission of Fine Arts approved the arch’s design in May 2026, notwithstanding that more than 99 percent of the roughly 1,000 public comments the Commission received opposed the project, and his own appointees on the National Capital Planning Commission granted preliminary approval in July 2026, notwithstanding a National Park Service finding that the arch would disrupt the historic sightlines connecting Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington House, Memorial Bridge, and the Lincoln Memorial. Three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian sued in 2026, arguing that a commemorative work of this scale requires the authorization of Congress itself under the Commemorative Works Act, in addition to review by the Commission and the Planning Commission, and that no such congressional authorization was ever sought or obtained. The Department of Justice moved to dismiss the suit, and in September 2026, with that motion still pending, the Secretary of the Interior announced that excavation would begin within 2 weeks regardless.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump used the powers of the presidency to inscribe his own name and likeness onto an independent peace institute, the Nation’s premier cultural institution, the circulating currency of the United States, and the White House itself, doing so over the express ruling of a Federal court in 1 instance and in defiance of statutes enacted by Congress in two others, in a sustained project of self-commemoration that no prior President of the United States has undertaken and that is fundamentally at odds with the republican character of the office Donald J. Trump swore to uphold.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Sec. Article XXVI: Emoluments Violations—Profiting Personally and Directly from the Presidency
Donald J. Trump violated his constitutional oath and the Constitution’s Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses by using the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family personally, directly, and on an unprecedented scale, through a network of cryptocurrency ventures that accepted billions of dollars in investment from foreign governments and entities with direct business before his administration.
This conduct includes the following:
(1)
According to Donald J. Trump’s own mandatory financial disclosure, released in mid-2026, he personally earned more than $1,400,000,000 from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in a single year, including $635,000,000 in royalties from Donald J. Trump-branded meme coins and $590,000,000 from World Liberty Financial, a crypto business co-founded by the President and his sons Eric and Donald, Jr. while he held office.
(2)
In May 2025, a company controlled by the Government of Abu Dhabi used World Liberty Financial’s own stablecoin to complete a $2,000,000,000 investment in Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange whose founder Donald J. Trump then pardoned 5 months later, an arrangement in which a foreign sovereign investment vehicle directed billions of dollars into a business bearing Donald J. Trump’s name and personally enriching him, in a transaction entangled with his own exercise of the pardon power.
(3)
The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives’ ranking member released a staff report in November 2025, documenting that the Trump family’s cryptocurrency network was entangled with foreign governments, corporate allies, and criminal actors, even as his administration simultaneously dismantled the regulatory protections meant to shield ordinary United States investors from the very products enriching his family.
(4)
None of the foreign or domestic payments flowing to Donald J. Trump and his family through these ventures were disclosed to or approved by Congress, notwithstanding that the Constitution requires such consent before any officer of the United States may accept an emolument from a foreign state, and notwithstanding that the scale of these personal profits exceeding $2,000,000,000 dollars in a single year according to his own disclosure, dwarfs any prior president’s financial entanglement with the office he holds.
(5)
Breaking with the practice of every president since Ronald Reagan, Donald J. Trump declined to place his assets in a blind trust or to divest his holdings, and beginning in January 2026, his personal brokerage accounts began actively trading individual stocks in companies with direct and substantial business before his own administration. His May 2026 disclosure alone reported 3,642 individual trades in the first quarter of the year, including large positions in Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, and Alphabet, all major Federal contractors, as well as defense contractors Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, purchased while Donald J. Trump was directing military strikes on Iran that predictably moved the value of those very companies’ stock.
(6)
Between January and March 2026, Donald J. Trump’s accounts made at least 9 purchases of stock in Palantir Technologies, a company holding a $1,300,000,000 Pentagon contract to develop the artificial-intelligence systems that help orchestrate United States military strikes, totaling as much as $630,000. Weeks after these purchases, in April 2026, Donald J. Trump posted on Truth Social naming the company’s stock ticker, that Palantir Technologies has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment
, a public endorsement of a stock he personally owned by a president whose own administration determines the size of that company’s defense contracts.
(7)
Donald J. Trump’s accounts likewise purchased stock in Axon Enterprise days before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within his own administration, announced its intent to buy $220,000,000 in Axon security equipment, a purchase that sent Axon’s share price up 34 percent. Donald J. Trump’s accounts purchased and sold shares of the GEO Group, 1 of 2 private companies that operate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, worth up to $625,000 in a year, the company touted the largest volume of new government business in its history. Donald J. Trump’s accounts purchased at least $1,000,000 of Dell stock in the months after Dell pledged a $6,200,000,000 commitment to a Trump-branded investment initiative, shortly before Donald J. Trump used a White House event to personally urge the public to go out and buy a Dell computer
and before Dell received a $9,700,000,000 Federal contract.
(8)
Donald J. Trump’s accounts also purchased shares of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, worth tens of thousands of dollars, and Comcast, worth more than a million dollars, while both Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery and its earlier merger with Skydance remained subject to review and approval by the FCC and the Department of Justice agencies of his own administration, and while Donald J. Trump was simultaneously making public statements about the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery contest and praising Paramount’s chief executive.
(9)
A White House spokesman claimed that Donald J. Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children
with no conflicts of interest
, while a Trump Organization spokesperson separately claimed the accounts are independently managed by third-party financial institutions
that provide the President no advance notice
of trades, two mutually inconsistent explanations offered to the press within the same reporting cycle, neither of which was accompanied by any independent verification, and neither of which explains why a supposedly blind and independently managed account would repeatedly purchase shares in the exact companies Donald J. Trump was simultaneously regulating, contracting with, or publicly promoting.
(10)
Even accepting the Administration’s own account that Donald J. Trump’s children or third-party advisors, rather than Donald J. Trump personally, selected these trades, that delegation does not cure the conflict of interest. The beneficial owner of the gains is Donald J. Trump himself, and it is Donald J. Trump himself, not his children or his brokers, who possesses and exercises the presidential powers of regulation, contracting, and public endorsement that move the value of the assets held for his benefit. An arrangement in which the President’s family profits from decisions the President makes is not a blind trust in any sense recognized by prior practice or by the ethics rules requiring true independence and divestiture, it is, at most, a trust that is blind to the trader but not to the beneficiary, and the conflict runs through the office regardless of whose hand executes the trade.
Through this conduct, Donald J. Trump converted the presidency into a personal and family financial enterprise by accepting billions of dollars in value from domestic and foreign sources with direct business before his administration and trading, whether personally or through family members and advisors acting for his benefit, in the securities of companies his own government regulates, contracts with, and whose stock price his own public statements and policy decisions can move, all in violation of the constitutional prohibition on any officer of the United States accepting emoluments from foreign states without the consent of Congress, and in betrayal of the public trust reposed in the office he holds.
Wherefore, Donald J. Trump, by such conduct, warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.