Trump to be cleared after vote rules out witnesses
Republicans halt probe into Ukraine scandal
Donald Trump looks set to escape impeachment after the US Senate voted not to call new witnesses.
The decision all-but guarantees his eventual acquittal. The vote on allowing new witnesses was defeated 51-49 – almost exactly the RepublicanDemocrat split in the Senate.
President Trump was impeached by the House last month on charges he abused power and obstructed Congress like no other president has done as he tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, and then blocked the congressional probe of his actions.
Despite the Democrats determination to hear new testimony, the Republican majority brushed past those demands to make this the first Senate impeachment trial without witnesses.
Even new revelations on Friday from former national security adviser John Bolton did not sway Republican senators, who said they had heard enough.
That means the eventual outcome for President Trump would be an acquittal “in name only”, said Democrat Val Demings, a House prosecutor, during final debate. Some even called it a cover-up.
In an unpublished manuscript, Mr Bolton writes that the president asked him during an Oval Office meeting in early May to bolster his effort to get Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to a person who read the passage.
In the meeting, Mr Bolton said the president asked him to call new Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy and persuade him to meet with Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was planning to go to Ukraine to coax the Ukrainians to investigate the president’s political rivals.
Mr Bolton writes that he never made the call to Mr Zelenskiy after the meeting.
The revelation adds more detail to allegations of how President Trump sought to influence Ukraine to aid investigations of his rivals that are central to the charge.
The Senate will vote on
Wednesday on whether to convict or acquit the President.
A two-thirds majority in the chamber of 67 votes is required to remove him from office. The Republicans control the Senate with a 53-47 majority over Democrats.
Republican senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said that, while the Democrats had shown the president’s actions were “inappropriate”, they had not proved to be impeachable offenses.
“The question is not then whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did,” he said.