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Behind the scenes of impeachment: crammed offices, late nights, cold pizza - The Boston Globe

posted onDecember 9, 2019
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Article snippet: WASHINGTON — Far from any television camera and a half world away from Ukraine, a few dozen Democratic staff aides, lawyers, and House members are grinding away this weekend in a loose clump of Capitol Hill offices, the beating heart of the impeachment operation against President Trump. In cramped spaces in the Rayburn and Longworth House Office Buildings, as well as the speaker’s suite, the final articles of impeachment are being incubated in the shadow of the Capitol dome. It is a frantic backstage tableau of Washington anthropology, populated by Judiciary and Intelligence Committee aides, lawmakers and counsels hunched over computers and yellow legal pads. History can get cluttered sometimes. The rooms are littered with empty soda cans, pie leftover from Thanksgiving, and boxes pulled from shelves containing files from past impeachments. There are recurrent calls for tech support, caffeine, and blankets, because the rooms can get cold, like the pizza. With so much grand talk about “constitutional duties” and “respecting the founders” and “honoring oaths,” there is also the mundane and the workaday. Norman L. Eisen, one of the Democrats’ special oversight counsels on the Judiciary Committee, is consulting through the weekend with a procession of staff and lawmakers, while Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who’s the Judiciary chairman, has been shuttling in recent days between the workspaces of his committee and the Capitol offices of Speaker Nancy Pelosi... Link to the full article to read more

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