Please show the exact Bribery statue he violated . . .
Presumably what Nancy Pelosi and several other members of Congress are referring to is
18 USC §201. While this statute establishes that a crime is committed when "a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for . . . being influenced in the performance of any official act," employing it in an article of impeachment against President Trump strikes me as questionable for two reasons. First, although I can't be certain, my impression is that although solicitation alone technically is sufficient, prosecutions typically are initiated under this statute only when the official has already accepted something of value or was apprehended in the act of accepting it. Second, demonstrating that the Ukrainian government was prepared to accede to a demand to make a public statement about investigating the Bidens would put that government in precisely the position it has been trying to avoid—in the middle of a U.S. political dispute—which would be undesirable from a policy perspective.
If the members of Congress favoring impeachment feel they must charge a statutory violation to establish abuse of power with respect Trump's request to Ukrainian President Zelensky,
52 USC §30201 would seem to be a more appropriate choice, since it explicitly applies to soliciting something of value
from a foreign national and does not require evidence that the foreign national intended to accede to the request. Moreover, Trump's own words in the White House transcript of his July telephone conversation with Zelensky establish a
prima facie case that he violated that law.
And, of course, any articles of impeachment may include the statutory crime of obstruction of justice, multiple instances of which were documented in Volume II of
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report.
