As the House Judiciary Committee prepares to take the reins of the impeachment process, the House Intelligence Committee is putting together its conclusions from its weeks-long inquiry into President Donald Trump's alleged misdeeds. And while the committee's Democrats are raising alarms about Trump's dealings in Ukraine, Republicans' main takeaway from the weeks of hearings is that apparently, Trump clearly did nothing wrong. The committee's minority report on the impeachment investigation was officially released Monday—and in a truly unsurprising move, House Intelligence Republicans are declaring that the evidence put forth during the impeachment investigation “does not establish any impeachable offense.” “The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry ... is merely the outgrowth of their obsession with re-litigating the results of the 2016 presidential election,” the report declares. “Despite their best efforts, the evidence gathered during the Democrats’ partisan and one-sided impeachment inquiry does not support that President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rival to benefit the President in the 2020 presidential election.”

The 123-page Republican report asserts that there is “no direct, firsthand evidence” to suggest that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden, and claims that Trump holding up congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine was rather driven by a “deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption.” “The President’s initial hesitation to meet with President Zelensky or to provide U.S. taxpayer-funded security assistance to Ukraine without thoughtful review is entirely prudent,” the report claims.

House Intelligence Republicans also apparently see nothing wrong with the unofficial channel that emerged between Ukrainian officials and Trump allies pushing the alleged quid pro quo, including Rudy Giuliani's efforts to persuade the Ukrainians to investigate Biden. “There is nothing inherently improper with Mayor Giuliani’s involvement ... because the Ukrainians knew that he was a conduit to convince President Trump that President Zelensky was serious about reform,” the report claims. Decrying the impeachment inquiry as “an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system” and “undo the will of the American people,” the Republicans also, naturally, have no issue with the White House's rampant stonewalling to prevent members of the Trump administration from complying with their congressional subpoenas and testifying. “President Trump’s assertion of longstanding claims of executive privilege is a legitimate response to an unfair, abusive, and partisan process, and does not constitute obstruction of a legitimate impeachment inquiry,” the Republicans declared in their findings. (The declaration, it should be noted, comes less than a week after a federal judge declared the White House's claim they could legally prohibit White House aides from complying with subpoenas is “a fiction” that “simply has no basis in the law.”)

The GOP document echoes the litany of defenses Republicans came up with during the Intelligence Committee's recent impeachment hearings, in which they relied on everything from conspiracy theories to smearing decorated war veterans in their attempt to detract from a series of very credible impeachment witnesses. And as with many of Republicans’ impeachment defenses, many of the points in their latest report don't exactly hold up under scrutiny. Trump's supposed devotion to combating corruption in Ukraine, for instance, is hard to reconcile when he never brought up corruption in any of his conversations with Zelensky (other than mentioning Biden). Giuliani being painted as a government conduit who was viewed as a way to communicate Ukraine's corruption reforms to Trump, similarly, doesn't square with the Trump lawyer's declaration in May that he was going to Ukraine to pressure them to launch investigations “because that information will be very, very helpful to my client.” And while the White House stonewalling means that there are no individuals who have given direct evidence of Trump ordering a quid pro quo scheme to withhold aid in exchange for political favors, the scores of witnesses who have testified provided damning evidence that shows that appears to be the case. Career official David Holmes, for instance, testified to Ambassador Gordon Sondland's phone call with Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine, in which the president asked if Zelensky would do the investigations. (Sondland, of course, also testified that there was a quid pro quo and that he worked with Giuliani “at the express direction of the president of the United States.”)

One of House Republicans' favorite impeachment-era arguments, which suggests that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election, has even been debunked by Republican lawmakers themselves. The conspiracy theory, which former National Security Council official Fiona Hill testified is “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” was again brought up in the GOP report, which claims that there are “legitimate, unanswered questions” about Ukraine's 2016 dealings. The lawmakers' Senate counterparts, however, apparently do not feel the same way. Politico reported Monday that the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigated allegations of Ukraine meddling in 2017, and even interviewed Democratic consultant Alexandra Chalupa, whom House Republicans frequently brought up in their lines of questioning during the impeachment hearings. Yet Senate lawmakers' interview with Chalupa was “fruitless,” Politico reports, and the committee did not follow up or call any more witnesses as part of their investigation. “I take very seriously the responsibility of, what I hear in classified settings needs to stay classified,” the committee's Ranking Member, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, recently told PBS. “But I think it is very clear to me, and this has been testified to by every leader of law enforcement, [and the] intelligence community, that there’s been absolutely no validity to this crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine was behind the 2016 intervention.”

Democrats will be releasing their own impeachment report Tuesday—but it's already clear that they're not thrilled with what their colleagues on the other side of the aisle have taken away from the impeachment process. In a statement responding to the Republican report, House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff accused his GOP committee members of writing a document “intended for an audience of one” that "ignores voluminous evidence that the president used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rival by withholding military aid and a White House meeting the President of Ukraine desperately sought.”

"Tellingly, the Minority dismisses this as just part of the President's ‘outside the beltway’ thinking,” Schiff added. “It is more accurately, outside the law and constitution, and a violation of his oath of office.”

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