Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told Just The News that the House of Representatives is actively exploring legislation to expunge President Donald Trump's first impeachment from the congressional record. The Ohio Republican framed the process in plain terms: a bill and a majority vote.
Trump was impeached by the House in December 2019 over a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Democrats at the time alleged that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate the Biden family's financial ties to the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The Senate acquitted him. But the impeachment mark has remained on the record, until now, potentially.
Jordan's confirmation that expungement is "something we're looking at" comes on the heels of newly declassified memos from the original 2019 Ukraine whistle-blower scandal. Those memos, first reported by Just The News, cast fresh doubt on the credibility of the CIA analyst at the center of the complaint, identified in media reports as Eric Ciaramella.
The declassified documents paint a picture of a complaint built on sand. Ciaramella admitted he had no direct knowledge of Trump's private comments or communications with Zelensky. His complaint, the memos show, rested on hearsay and second- or third-hand accounts, not firsthand observation of the call that Democrats treated as a constitutional crisis.
That alone should have given Congress pause in 2019. But there is more. Ciaramella initially omitted from his official disclosure form that he had prior procedural contact with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who led the impeachment inquiry. He later apologized for the omission. A supporting witness, labeled "Witness 2" in the documents, was an NSC/NSA official linked to Peter Strzok, a name that needs no introduction to anyone who followed the FBI's conduct during the Russia investigation.
The memos also revealed Ciaramella's expressed dislike for Republicans, including former Rep. Devin Nunes and Kash Patel. And they showed that Ciaramella worked closely with then-Vice President Joe Biden on Ukraine policy, traveling with Biden and discussing the dismissal of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who at the time was probing Burisma. That same Burisma paid Biden's son Hunter millions of dollars.
Evidence of bias, hearsay foundations, and undisclosed contacts with the lead impeachment manager's staff, all of it, the reporting indicates, was kept classified during Trump's House impeachment in December 2019 and the subsequent Senate trial. Members of Congress and the public were denied the full picture while the most consequential political proceeding short of a criminal trial moved forward.
The pattern is familiar. Earlier reporting on the impeachment saga documented how politically motivated actors worked to build cases against Trump that crumbled under scrutiny, always after the political damage was done.
Jordan did not promise a vote date or unveil specific bill text. But his statement to Just The News was unambiguous about both the mechanism and the intent:
"You need a majority vote, we need a bill, and it's actually something we're looking at."
That language, "something we're looking at", falls short of a formal announcement. No bill number exists yet in the public record. No floor schedule has been set. But for the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over impeachment proceedings to confirm the effort is real marks a concrete step beyond the aspirational resolutions that came before.
This is not the first time House Republicans have floated expungement. In June 2023, during the 118th Congress, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a resolution targeting the 2019 impeachment, while New York Rep. Elise Stefanik introduced a companion resolution for the 2021 impeachment. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy publicly supported both measures. Neither advanced to a vote.
What has changed since then? For one, the declassified memos now provide a factual foundation that the earlier resolutions lacked. The whistle-blower's admitted reliance on hearsay, his concealed ties to Schiff's office, and his documented bias against Republican officials all strengthen the case that the first impeachment was procedurally tainted from the start.
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert who served on Trump's defense team during the Senate trial, said he sees no legal barrier to expungement. His assessment went further than the procedural:
"I don't see any reason why it couldn't be done. Impeachment is a quasi-judicial procedure, whether you have to go back to Congress and ask them to expunge it or go to the courts."
Dershowitz then offered a broader judgment on what the newly surfaced evidence means for the impeachment's legitimacy:
"But I have to tell you one thing, history will expunge it already because what you've done is you've created so much doubt about the credibility of the main accuser that it's hard for anybody to sit back now and say that was a just impeachment. They violated the Constitution."
That is a strong claim from a legal scholar who has spent decades at the center of constitutional debate. And it tracks with what the declassified record now shows: the accuser had no direct knowledge, hid his connections to the impeachment's architects, and carried documented political bias.
Democrats, of course, have shown no sign of accepting this framing. Some have openly pledged to pursue fresh impeachment proceedings against Trump if they regain the House majority, a posture that makes the expungement effort all the more urgent for Republicans who view the original proceedings as an abuse of the process.
The first impeachment was always the more legally tenuous of the two brought against Trump. It rested on a single phone call, filtered through a whistle-blower complaint that we now know was assembled from secondhand information by an analyst with undisclosed political entanglements. The Senate acquitted Trump, but the House vote itself, and its permanent place in the congressional record, remained.
Expungement would not erase the historical fact that the vote occurred. But it would formally repudiate the proceeding, signaling that the House itself regards the impeachment as unjust. Whether that carries legal weight or merely symbolic force is a question Dershowitz left open, noting the process could involve Congress, the courts, or both.
The political dynamics within the Democratic caucus have shifted as well. Internal divisions over removal strategies have exposed a party unable to settle on a coherent approach to Trump, veering between impeachment talk, 25th Amendment fantasies, and quiet retreat depending on the news cycle.
Jordan's committee now sits in the position to act where previous efforts stalled. The 118th Congress had the resolutions from Greene and Stefanik, McCarthy's public backing, and a Republican majority. It still did not get done. The question is whether the current Congress, armed with declassified evidence that was unavailable before, will follow through where its predecessor did not.
There are practical hurdles. The bill text has not been drafted, or at least not publicly released. The vote math in a closely divided House is never guaranteed. And any expungement effort will face fierce opposition from Democrats who have treated both impeachments as defining achievements of their resistance to Trump.
At various points, Democratic leaders themselves have abandoned impeachment pushes when the political winds shifted, leaving their own members stranded. The willingness to weaponize the process when convenient and discard it when inconvenient is part of what makes the expungement argument resonate with Republicans and many independents.
Jordan confirmed the direction. Dershowitz endorsed the legality. The declassified memos supply the evidentiary ammunition. What remains is the legislative work, drafting the bill, whipping the votes, and bringing it to the floor.
No timeline has been announced. No formal introduction has been made. But the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee does not casually tell reporters that expungement is "something we're looking at" unless the gears are already turning.
The broader question, whether Democrats will continue shelving their own impeachment ambitions or reignite them in response, remains open. But the ground has shifted. The whistle-blower's credibility is in tatters. The concealed evidence is now public. And the House appears ready to act on what many conservatives have argued for years: that the first impeachment of Donald Trump was a political exercise dressed up as a constitutional one.
When the accusers' own memos prove they had no firsthand knowledge and hid their political ties, the congressional record deserves a correction. A majority vote is all it takes.
