As the House Judiciary Committee takes up the momentous task of drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, a book written by one of the committee's temporary hires offers clues about what allegations those articles could contain.

Joshua Matz, who is on leave from the boutique firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink as he works on the impeachment inquiry, co-authored a book with Harvard's Laurence Tribe in 2017 titled "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment."

The book, written and published while special counsel Robert Mueller's probe was still ongoing, does acknowledge Trump's presidency and the calls to remove him from office. But it also warns against potential abuses of impeachment powers, and calls on Congress to weigh the consequences of either removing a sitting president, or allowing a potentially corrupt executive to remain in office.

It was likely that expertise that brought Matz to the committee earlier this year. That meant he, alongside other Democratic staffers for the committee, was in the room for the Judiciary Committee's first impeachment hearing Wednesday.

And when George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley began saying the House should have gone to court to enforce congressional subpoenas for witness testimony—and that lawmakers could have gotten such an order by now—Matz began shaking his head in apparent disbelief.

The House has been locked in court battles with the Trump administration for months, and only recently secured a district court order for ex-White House counsel Don McGahn's testimony. Getting a final judgement that would fully secure witness testimony related to the Ukraine investigation was all but certain to not happen in the timeframe Turley laid out.

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At Wednesday's hearing, former Obama White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen laid the groundwork for three potential articles of impeachment against Trump. Those include abuse of power and bribery, obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.

Matz and Tribe's book was written long before Trump's alleged offenses at the heart of the impeachment inquiry—withholding military aid from Ukraine in exchange for politically motivated investigations—took place. But it still touches upon the offenses that are now being considered for articles of impeachment.

For example, Matz and Tribe go back to the text of the U.S. Constitution to define the charge in the context of impeachment, rather than relying on the criminal code.

They wrote that "the Framers struck directly at the core evil: quid pro quo bargains. By writing bribery into the Impeachment Clause, they ensured that the nation could expel a leader who would sell out its interests to advance his own."

And the authors defined "impeachable bribery" as a "corrupt exercise of power in exchange for a personal benefit."

"The ultimate question is whether a president exchanged money or other favors with the intent of influencing some official action or inaction," the book reads.

The book does not offer a specific definition for abuse of power, although it repeatedly refers to it in the context of impeachment. In defining "high crimes and misdemeanors," Matz and Tribe write that "they involve corruption, betrayal, or an abuse of power that subverts core tenets of the U.S. governmental system."

"They require proof of intention, evil deeds that risk grave injury to the nation," the book says. "Finally, they are so plainly wrong by current standards that no reasonable official could honestly profess surprise at being impeached."

The book also makes regular references to the Framers' concerns about foreign interference in U.S. elections, characterizing that fear as a driving factor for allowing impeachment.

"In creating the impeachment power, the Framers worried most of all about election fraud, bribery, traitorous acts, and foreign intrusion," Matz and Tribe wrote. "Willful conspiracy with a hostile foreign power to influence the outcome of a presidential election directly evokes all of these concerns."

In an epilogue published in 2018, Tribe and Matz touch more directly on potential acts of obstruction of justice by Trump, like the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

"While many facts critical to an assessment of Trump's conduct remain unknown, this highly irregular pattern of behavior cries out for congressional scrutiny," they wrote, ahead of the conclusion of Mueller's probe and the publication of his findings. "Regardless of whether Trump's conduct satisfies the elements of an obstruction charge under applicable provisions of the U.S. Code, it might well justify impeachment hearings in the House."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she was asking House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler to begin drafting articles of impeachment. And shortly afterward, the Judiciary Committee announced a hearing next week where lawyers from that committee and the Intelligence Committee will lay out the evidence for impeachment.

That signals that allegations from the Mueller report, as well as the findings from the Ukraine investigation, are being considered for articles of impeachment.

The constitutional law scholars who testified Wednesday largely agreed that Trump's offenses had reached the bar for impeachment. To not impeach him, they warned, would do lasting damage to American democracy, potentially to the point of no return.

That's a message that Tribe and Matz also included in their book.

"Impeachment should occur when a president's prior misdeeds are so awful in their own right, and so disturbing a signal of future conduct, that allowing the president to remain in office poses a clear danger of grave harm to the constitutional order," they wrote. "When circumstances like these arise, failing to impeach can pose a threat even greater than the inherent risk of impeachment."

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