What You Need to Know About Trump, Ukraine and Impeachment

To President Donald Trump, his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was “perfect.” But it set in motion a chain of events that led the U.S. House of Representatives to formally propose removing Trump from office by impeachment, which will be decided by a trial in the U.S. Senate.

In that telephone call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to “look into” allegations of wrongdoing by former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential 2020 competitor, and his son, Hunter. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,” Trump said as he steered the conversation toward the topic, according to an approximate transcript of the call that Trump subsequently ordered released. Trump also asked for an investigation into a conspiracy theory that holds that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hacking of U.S. Democrats in the 2016 election, a theory that intelligence and national security officials say is contradicted by evidence uncovered by several investigations.