When President Bill Clinton had an affair with an intern and lied about it under oath, you called for his impeachment stating, "I believe the evidence of serious wrongdoing is simply too compelling to be swept aside." But somehow you're perfectly fine with President Trump abusing the power of the presidency to secure an advantage in a political election because you don't see the "quid pro quo" in the rough transcript of the president's phone call with Ukraine President Zelensky. Although not required by the Constitution or federal election law to establish impeachable or illegal conduct, President Trump's words are as close to an explicit quid pro quo as any smart criminal is likely to get. The fact that you don't see it is probably because you are regurgitating White House talking points, rather than making your own independent judgments.

Last we heard, you had not yet bothered to read the nine page whistleblower report, so perhaps you'll reconsider after you have a better understanding of some of the relevant facts pertaining to Trump and his attempts to influence Ukraine as outlined below (this timeline is based on one printed by the Washington Post).

* June 2017: President Trump and his private attorney Rudy Giuliani begin pressuring Ukraine to refuse cooperating with the Mueller investigation. Ukrainian officials succumb to this pressure according to New York Times reporting and stop assisting Robert Mueller’s investigation fearing that doing so would negatively impact their relationship with the Trump Administration.

* Throughout 2019: Giuliani holds multiple meetings with Ukrainian government officials to push them to pursue an investigation against President Trump's political opponent Joe Biden and his son, despite no evidence of any misconduct. Giuliani also promotes unfounded right wing conspiracy theory that the Hillary campaign and DNC conspired with foreign operatives, including Ukrainian, to influence the 2016 election.

* May 7: Trump Administration unexpectedly recalls U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

* May 13: AG Barr announces he will launch a probe into the origins of the Russian election interference investigation. The whistleblower's complaint later cites a report claiming that Giuliani's investigators were to aid this probe.

* May 14: Trump tells Vice President Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration. The whistleblower's report says it was “made clear” to officials that “the President did not want to meet with Mr. Zelenskyy until he saw how Zelenskyy ‘chose to act’ in office."

* Mid-May: According to the whistleblower's report, the whistleblower is told that officials, including Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker and E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland, had spoken with Giuliani in an effort to “contain the damage” he was doing by circumventing the government's official processes with regards to Ukraine, and that the ambassadors had been working with Ukrainian officials to help them figure out how to resolve the conflict between government messaging and Giuliani’s.

The whistleblower also reports that during this same time officials told the whistleblower that Ukrainian leaders believed “that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues that had been publicly aired by Mr. Lutsenko and Mr. Giuliani."

* May 16: then Prosecutor General Lutsenko says there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens.

* May 19: in an interview with Fox News, Trump explicitly voices the false narrative that Joe Biden forced the firing of Ukraine's Prosecutor to shield his son from investigation.

* May 20: Zelensky is inaugurated as president of Ukraine.

* May 23: The administration notifies Congress that it intends to release aid money to Ukraine.

* June 5: After meeting with President Zelensky, you Senator Portman made these comments on the Senate floor. “I was very eager to meet President Zelensky. First of all, along with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I have been a longtime supporter of Ukraine’s quest for self-determination, democracy, and freedom from Russian aggression. As co-chair and co-founder of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, along with my colleague, Dick Durbin from Illinois, I have been proud to take the lead since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 in giving Ukrainians the lethal and non-lethal aid they need to defend themselves from aggression in Crimea and the Donbas region."

* June 13: Trump tells ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that he would accept electoral assistance from a foreign government, if offered. The chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission subsequently tweets that this would be illegal.

* June 20: in an interview with Fox News, Trump falsely links Ukraine with the effort to hack the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.

* July 18: Trump Administration tells the State and Defense departments that he has decided to withhold $391 million in aid to Ukraine. Members of Congress are told the hold is part of an “interagency delay.”

* July 24: Mueller testifies before Congress about his report and its findings. Trump feels that he has been vindicated.

* July 25: Trump and Ukraine President Zelensky speak on the phone. As we later learn from the rough transcript, Trump repeatedly notes how “good” the United States is to Ukraine and asks Zelensky to open two investigations -- one involving CrowdStrike, an Internet security company that examined the Democratic National Committee server hacked by Russia in 2016, and the other involving the Bidens.

“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump says. He later adds: “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

Trump repeatedly suggests Attorney General Barr and his private attorney Rudy Giuliani will be involved in working with the Ukrainian government on the investigation.

Zelensky tells Trump that his new prosecutor general “will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue" -- referring to Burisma, the company for which Hunter Biden served as a member of the board.

* Days following July 25: The whistleblower writes: “I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the (Zelensky) phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call." The whistleblower reports that he was told by White House officials that these actions were directed by White House lawyers to move the transcript from the normal documentation archive to “a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature” — a move one official reportedly called an “act of abuse.”

* July 26: US Volker and Sondland traveled to Kiev and met with Zelensky and other politicians. There, the whistleblower writes, they “reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President had made of” Zelensky.

* July 28: Trump announces that DNI Coats will resign in August.

* July 31: Trump holds a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russians claim Trump and Putin spoke about restoring full relations between the countries.

* Aug. 2: Giuliani travels to Madrid as a direct follow-up to the July 25 call according to the whistleblower, and meets with a Zelensky adviser named Andriy Yermak. The New York Times reports the meeting involved Giuliani’s encouraging Zelensky’s government to investigate Hunter Biden.

* Aug. 3: Zelensky announces that he will travel to the United States to meet with Trump in Washington in September.

* Aug. 8: Trump announces Joseph Maguire will take Coats’s job as director of national intelligence in an acting capacity. In doing so, he bypasses Sue Gordon, who had been Coats’s No. 2 and was a career intelligence official with bipartisan support. Gordon later resigns.

* Aug. 9: Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House. Asked about inviting Zelensky to the White House and what advice he would offer on dealing with Putin, Trump says. “I think he’s going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White House. . . He’s already been invited to the White House, and he wants to come. And I think he will. He’s a very reasonable guy. He wants to see peace in Ukraine. And I think he will be coming very soon, actually."

* Aug. 12: An anonymous whistleblower files a complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community. Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson later determines the complaint to be credible and a matter of “urgent concern,” triggering a legally required disclosure to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

* Late August: Lawmakers raise concerns about Ukraine aid being withheld, citing its importance to defend the country from Russia. (Note Senator Portman's own remarks made on the Senate floor in June).

* Sept. 1: Zelensky and Vice President Pence meet in Poland as part of a ceremony commemorating World War II.

* Sept. 2: Pence says he didn’t discuss Biden with Zelensky, but that he did suggest that U.S. aid was contingent on rooting out corruption.

* Early September: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) travels to Ukraine and meets with Zelensky. He later says that Zelensky expressed concern about Giuliani’s overtures.

* Sept. 5: The Post editorial board writes that it had been “reliably told” that Trump was “attempting to force Mr. Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.”

* Sept. 9: Atkinson notifies the House and Senate intelligence committees that a whistleblower has filed a complaint, but it has not been forwarded on to Congress as per legal requirements.

* Sept. 10: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) writes to Acting Director of National Intelligence Maguire demanding Congress receive the complaint.

* Sept. 11: The Trump administration releases the Ukraine aid it had been withholding.

* Sept. 19: Atkinson briefs Congress in a closed-door session. That evening, Giuliani appears on CNN and suggests it would be okay if Trump withheld aid in exchange for Ukraine investigating the Bidens.

* Sept. 23: Trump suggests aid to Ukraine may have been withheld over “corruption” issues.

* Sept. 26: Maguire testifies to the House Intelligence Committee that he did not send the whistleblower report to Congress because the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel downgraded the inspector general’s determination that the whistleblower complaint was of “urgent concern." Democrats cry foul, highlighting the fact that Attorney General Barr -- the head of the Justice Department -- was himself named in the whistleblower complaint.

* Sept. 27: A bipartisan group of more than 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials sign a statement supporting House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry following President Trump's call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. They write that they find the president's actions a "profound national security concern," saying "President Trump appears to have leveraged the authority and resources of the highest office in the land to invite additional foreign interference into our democratic processes. That would constitute an unconscionable abuse of power. It also would represent an effort to subordinate America's national interests -- and those of our closest allies and partners -- to the president's personal political interest."

The bipartisan group states that the president's actions could make the United States "more vulnerable to threats, and sends a message to leaders around the world that America's foreign policy can be dangerously corrupted by catering to a single individual." They add, "If we fail to speak up — and act — now our foreign policy and national security will officially be on offer to those who can most effectively fulfill the President's personal prerogatives." The group encourages an impeachment inquiry given the White House's efforts to cover up the president's conduct. "All of us recognize the imperative of formal impeachment proceedings to ascertain additional facts and weigh the consequences of what we have learned and what may still emerge. We applaud those Members of Congress, including Speaker Pelosi, who have now started us down that necessary path," they wrote. "There is no escaping that what we already know is serious enough to merit impeachment proceedings. From there, the facts -- and nothing but the facts -- should dictate how Congress holds the president to account and signals to the world that our foreign policy and national security are not for sale."

Senator Portman, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as the co-founder and co-chair of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, as the representative of a state with a significant Ukranian diaspora population, you know the right thing to do. You understand the seriousness of the threat posed by President Trump as outlined by the 300+ former national security and foreign policy officials. Yet, you have to date refused to do anything about it.

You have said that it's not important to investigate the Administration's gross misconduct any further because Congress needs to get things done. With all due respect, the Republican Senate has allowed Leader McConnell to stonewall legislation addressing gun safety, climate change, civil rights, campaign finance reform, election security, and humanitarian conditions for migrants. You are not getting things done. Your professed desire for legislative productivity is disingenuous at best and, frankly, despicable, given all the bills passed by the House that are being denied hearing in the Senate.

Any failure on your part to speak up in support of congressional impeachment proceedings is a representation of your choice to subordinate the best interests of the country to your own personal political best interests.

Sadly, when the biggest threat to our democracy and our country may very well be the man in the Oval Office, impeachment proceedings are the best and only path forward for members of Congress to unveil the truth. We MUST have sunlight on the actions of this president and we fully expect you to stop hiding in the shadows of this corrupt administration.

In closing, we call on you to do the following:

1) speak out now and publicly support the House impeachment inquiry to uncover and reveal the truth.
2) speak out publicly against President Trump’s threats to the whistleblower.
2) If you cannot or will not do the foregoing, you must hold in-person public town halls across the state NOW to explain why you think President Trump's conduct is an appropriate and lawful exercise of his powers and unworthy of congressional investigation.