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US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that he was not ruling out calling witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial – but indicated he was in no hurry to seek new testimony either – as politicians remain at an impasse over the form of the trial by the Republican-controlled Senate.
The House voted on Wednesday to impeach Trump, who became only the third president in US history to be formally charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors”. But the Senate trial may be held up until congressional leaders agree on how to proceed. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is demanding trial witnesses who refused to appear during House committee hearings, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
McConnell, who has all-but-promised a swift acquittal of the president, has resisted making any guarantees, and has cautioned Trump against seeking the testimony of witnesses he desires for fear of elongating the trial. Instead, he appears to have secured Republican support for his plans to impose a framework drawn from the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. “We haven’t ruled out witnesses,” McConnell said Monday in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” “We’ve said let’s handle this case just like we did with President Clinton. Fair is fair.”
The US House of Representatives approves the first article of impeachment charging President Donald Trump with abuse of power for seeking interference by Ukraine in the 2020 US presidential election. The House adopted the article largely along par…
That trial featured a 100-0 vote on arrangements that established two weeks of presentations and argument before a partisan tally in which then-minority Republicans called a limited number of witnesses. But Democrats now would need Republican votes to secure witness testimony – and Republicans believe they have the votes to eventually block those requests.
Democrats accuse Trump of abusing his power in office by pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the 2020 election. The impeachment inquiry was centred on a July phone call in which Trump asks his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Biden. At the time of the call, the Trump administration was withholding nearly $400m in military aid from Ukraine. Trump was also impeached for obstruction of justice related to his refusal to participate in the inquiry.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and branded his impeachment as a politically-motivated effort by Democrats to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
In a letter on Monday to all Senators, Schumer argued that the circumstances in the Trump trial are different from that of Clinton, who was impeached after a lengthy independent counsel investigation in which witnesses had already testified numerous times under oath. Schumer rejected the Clinton model, saying waiting until after the presentations to decide on witnesses would “foreclose the possibility of obtaining such evidence because it will be too late”.
Schumer also demanded that the Senate, in addition to receiving testimony, also compel the Trump administration to turn over documents and emails relevant to the case, including the decision to withhold military assistance from Ukraine.
In the letter, Schumer wrote that denying the Senate these documents “would be to turn a willfully blind eye to the facts” in the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges against Trump.
Meanwhile, the White House is projecting confidence that it will prevail in a constitutional spat with Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has delayed sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate in hopes of giving Schumer more leverage in talks with McConnell. But the White House believes Pelosi won’t be able to hold out much longer. “She will yield. There’s no way she can hold this position,” Marc Short, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said on Sunday. “We think her case is going nowhere.’’
The impasse between the Senate leaders leaves open the possibility of a protracted delay until the articles are delivered.
Schumer told reporters in New York on Sunday that “the Senate is yearning to give President Trump due process, which means that documents and witnesses should come forward. What is a trial with no witnesses and no documents. It’s a sham trial.” – Al Jazeera
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