Trump
impeachment trial to be set in motion next week, Pelosi indicates
House
speaker says she plans next week to transmit articles of impeachment to the
Senate, which will trigger Trump’s trial there
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee Email
Fri 10 Jan
2020 17.37 GMTLast modified on Sat 11 Jan 2020 00.01 GMT
US Speaker
of the House Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, speaks during her weekly
press briefing on Capitol Hill. Impeachment ‘managers’ will prosecute the case
against Trump in the Senate. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty
Images
An
impeachment trial against Donald Trump will be set in motion in the Senate next
week, according to a letter sent on Friday by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi,
to colleagues.
A
two-thirds majority of senators voting to convict Trump on either of two
articles of impeachment would result in his removal from office, although that
is considered a long shot given the Republicans’ firm control of the Senate.
“I have asked judiciary committee chairman
Jerry Nadler to be prepared to bring to the floor next week a resolution to
appoint managers and transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate,” Pelosi
wrote in the letter.
Impeachment
“managers” will prosecute the case against Trump in the Senate. Last month the
House approved two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of
power and one for obstruction of Congress.
While
Trump’s survival seemed assured, new signs of potential hazards in the process
for Trump emerged on Friday, with the revelation by the Maine senator Susan
Collins, a moderate Republican locked in a tough re-election fight, that she
had been working all week with a “fairly small group” of fellow Republican
senators to allow for witnesses at the trial.
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“We should
be completely open to calling witnesses,” Collins was quoted as saying by
Bangor Daily News, which first published the report.
The Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other leading Republicans have stated
categorically that no witnesses should be called in the trial, framing the
impeachment as a “sham” and defending Trump’s conduct as irreproachable.
But just
four Republicans would be needed to create a simple majority, with the
47-member Democratic caucus, to force the appearance of witnesses and the
inclusion of documents and other evidence in the trial.
After the
articles are transmitted to the Senate, McConnell has signaled that he wishes
to open and close a trial quickly, moving this week to settle on rules for the
trial without any input from Democrats.
McConnell
had accused Pelosi of delaying the transmission of the articles out of a sense
of embarrassment on the part of Democrats, he said, in the weakness of the
case.
But in her
letter, Pelosi detailed new evidence to emerge since impeachment of a plot by
Trump to extort Ukraine into making negative headlines about Joe Biden, his
political rival. The evidence included internal White House and Pentagon emails
documenting the circumstances of the holdup in nearly $400m in aid to Ukraine.
Pelosi had
said she was waiting to transmit the articles to the Senate until McConnell
made clear the terms of a trial. Republicans including McConnell have
pre-emptively opposed hearing from witnesses and reviewing evidence at the
trial, and said they would not act as “impartial jurors” despite an oath of
impartiality they will be required under Senate rules to swear.
“Yesterday,
he [McConnell] showed his true colors and made his intentions to stonewall a
fair trial even clearer by signing on to a resolution that would dismiss the
charges. A dismissal is a cover-up and deprives the American people of the
truth,” Pelosi wrote.
Pressure
had been growing on Pelosi, including from other Democrats, to transmit the
articles in the third week after impeachment. The House returned from a holiday
break at the start of the week.
The
announcement appeared to set up a Senate trial to begin sometime after a
Democratic debate scheduled for Tuesday night, which would include the
participation of four senators running for president: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie
Sanders, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker.
Once the
Senate trial begins, senators are required to be present in Washington for
proceedings scheduled to run every day except Sunday until the trial is
finished.
“I will be
consulting with you at our Tuesday House Democratic Caucus meeting on how we
proceed further,” Pelosi wrote to her colleagues.
“In an
impeachment trial, every Senator takes an oath to ‘do impartial justice
according to the constitution and laws’,” Pelosi wrote. “Every senator now
faces a choice: to be loyal to the president or the constitution.”
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