A public memo that outlined the Senate’s obligations during an impeachment trial is no longer accessible to the public on a Senate web server.
The memo, titled, “An Overview of the Impeachment Process,” dates to 2005, when it was produced by a legislative attorney working for the Congressional Research Service. It provides a legal interpretation of several impeachment-related powers and duties of the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives, based on a detailed review of the Congressional record dating back to 1868.
The document, which was still circulating among journalists and academics as late as early October, was housed on a server maintained by Senate.gov. Reporters this week began noticing that the URL returned a 404 error message, indicating the PDF document couldn’t be found. The impeachment memo isn’t available at another online database maintained by CRS.
A person in the Secretary of the Senate’s office referred Washingtonian to the webmaster, who could not give comment. An official in the Secretary’s office later said they believed it was a maintenance issue, but was probing for more details. By Wednesday, after receiving inquiries about the memo, Senate staff had removed the document’s listing entirely from its impeachment resource guide, where it previously appeared as a dead link. It was unclear how long the report has been inaccessible, or whether anyone noticed it was missing.
The memo has been widely cited during the Trump era. As a result, several published references have pointed to the faulty Senate address, including a report by Common Cause; neighborly chatter on forums like DC Urban Moms and Dads; and high school lesson plans teaching “the rule of law.”
The original document can still be located, though, because it is preserved in a digital archive at the University of North Texas. (It’s also archived on the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” where it was last captured on September 30.) Although the memo is nonpartisan, several of its conclusions construe the impeachment powers of the House broadly, while limiting the Senate more narrowly to a set of prescribed procedures. For example, the memo concludes that an impeachment investigation can originate with the declaration of a single House member, the method that Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked in late September, which was recently upheld by a federal judge. The memo also doesn’t define which committee must oversee the investigation, also in keeping with Pelosi’s approach. Both points have been pressed repeatedly by Republicans to discredit the House impeachment inquiry.
Compared to a slate of recent CRS memos on impeachment, the 2005 report also appears more adamant about what is required of the Senate. For comparison, a new impeachment overview published by CRS just last month describes the Senate’s requirement to hold a trial as an open question, or at least “subject to debate”; the 2005 memo, by contrast, entertains no such possibility, treating the Senate trial as a foregone conclusion. It also briskly lays out a series of required steps that the Senate must take, some of which might present challenging optics for Senate Republicans, such as issuing a written summons to the president that requests his appearance at a scheduled time.
The Senate.gov mishap could be a glitch, of course. The document had been listed on an impeachment resource guide. But it was the only PDF document that wasn’t viewable, while visitors to the page could still access other impeachment documents, such as those relating to Bill Clinton.
In any case, the erasure of the address may make it more difficult for people seeking various perspectives on impeachment procedures.
Note: This piece was updated to reflect additional comment from the Secretary of the Senate’s office, and their removal Wednesday of the document listing from a public resource page.
