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Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is proposing to delay the start of Donald Trump’s impeachment by a week or more so that the former president has time to review the case.
House Democrats who voted to impeach Trump last week for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill have signaled they want a speedy trial when President Joe Biden begins his term, saying a reckoning is necessary. complete before the country, and Congress, can move on.
But McConnell told fellow Republican senators in a call Thursday that a short delay would give Trump time to prepare and defend his legal team, ensuring due process.
Indiana Sen. Mike Braun said after the call that the trial may not begin “until mid-February.” He said that was because “the process as it occurred in the House evolved so quickly, and that it is not in line with the time it takes to prepare a defense in a trial in the Senate.”
The calendar will be set by Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who can trigger the start of the trial when she sends the House charges for “incitement to insurrection” to the Senate, and also by McConnell and the new Senate Majority Leader , Chuck Schumer. , who are in negotiations on how to establish a 50-50 partisan split in the Senate and the short-term agenda.
Schumer is in charge of the Senate, taking over as Majority Leader after Democrats won two new Senate seats in Georgia and Vice President Kamala Harris took office Wednesday. But with such a narrow division, Republicans will have a say in the proceedings of the trial.
Democrats hope to carry out the procedures while passing legislation that is a priority for Biden, including coronavirus relief, but they would also need some cooperation from Senate Republicans to do so.
Schumer told reporters Thursday that he was still negotiating with McConnell on how to carry out the trial, “but make no mistake about it. There will be a trial, there will be a vote, for or against, or if the president is sentenced ”.
Pelosi could send the article to the Senate as soon as Friday. Democrats say the proceedings should move quickly because everyone witnessed the siege, many of them fleeing for safety as the rioters reached the Capitol.
“It will be soon, I don’t think it will be for long, but we must,” Pelosi said Thursday. He said Trump did not deserve a “jail release card” for his historic second impeachment trial just because he left office and Biden and others are calling for national unity.
Without the White House attorney’s office to defend him, as he did in his first trial last year, Trump’s allies have been seeking attorneys to defend the former president’s case. Members of his previous legal teams have indicated that they do not plan to join the effort, but South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told his Republican colleagues Thursday that Trump was hiring South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers, according to a person familiar with the matter. with the call that anonymity was granted to discuss it. Bowers did not immediately respond to a message Thursday.
The nine Pelosi impeachment managers, who have been meeting regularly to discuss strategy, will prosecute the House case. Pelosi said she would speak with them “in the next few days” about when the Senate might be ready for a trial, indicating that the decision could be extended until next week.
Trump told thousands of supporters to “fight like hell” against the election results that Congress certified on January 6, just before an angry mob stormed the Capitol and interrupted the count. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the chaos, and the House impeached the outgoing president a week later, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
Pelosi said it would be “detrimental to unity” to forget that “people died here on January 6, the attempt to undermine our election, to undermine our democracy, to dishonor our Constitution.”
After his first impeachment trial, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February after his White House legal team, aided by his personal attorneys, aggressively fought the House charges that he had encouraged the President of Ukraine to investigate. Biden in exchange for military aid. This time, Pelosi noted, the House was not seeking to condemn the president for private conversations, but for a very public insurrection that they themselves experienced and which was broadcast on live television.
“This year the whole world witnessed the incitement of the president,” Pelosi said.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second Senate Democrat, said it was still too early to know how long a trial would take or if Democrats would want to call witnesses. But he said, “You don’t need to tell us what was going on with the mob scene, we were running down the stairs to escape.”
McConnell, who said this week that Trump had “provoked” his supporters before the riot, has not said how he will vote. He told his Republican colleagues it would be a vote of conscience.
