McConnell proposes rules for Trump trial
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday proposed ground rules to speed President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial along — rules that Democrats immediately opposed.
McConnell, R-Ky., showed his hand hours after Trump’s legal team called on the Senate to “swiftly reject” the charges and acquit the president, arguing that Democrats would “permanently weaken the presidency” if they succeed in removing him from office over what the team characterized as policy and political differences.
McConnell proposed a four-day schedule for opening statements — two days for each side. After the opening arguments, senators would be allowed up to 16 hours for questions to the prosecution and defense, followed by four hours of debate.
Only then would there be votes on calling other witnesses. Democrats had demanded that those votes be held up front.
At the end of deliberations, the Senate would then vote on each impeachment article: abuse of power by withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressed the country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, and obstruction of Congress by refusing to
comply with their investigation.
The rules leave open the possibility that the Senate could not only decline to hear new evidence not uncovered in the House impeachment inquiry, but could also sidestep considering the House case against Trump altogether — although such a vote is considered unlikely.
The Senate Democratic leader, Charles Schumer, called the GOP leader’s proposed rules package a “national disgrace.”
“Under this resolution, Sen. McConnell is saying he doesn’t want to hear any of the existing evidence, and he doesn’t want to hear any new evidence,” said Schumer, D-N.Y., adding, “It’s clear Sen. McConnell is hell-bent on making it much more difficult to get witnesses and documents and intent on rushing the trial through.”
Schumer has said senators should hear from top White House officials such as former national security adviser John Bolton and acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who refused to cooperate with the House investigation.
The president’s lawyers have indicated that if Democrats pursue additional witness testimony, they would want to subpoena Biden and his son, Hunter, whose time serving on the corporate board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma would have been the focus of the investigation proposed by the president’s allies.
“If we call one witness, we’re going to call all the witnesses — there’s not going to be a process where the Democrats get their witnesses and the president gets shut out,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Fox News Sunday.
Voting on the Republican leader’s resolution will be one of the first orders of business when senators convene today. Schumer vowed to propose votes to try to amend the rules package, which he called a “cover-up.”
The first several days of the Senate trial are now almost certain to be tangled in procedural motions playing out on the Senate floor or, more likely, in private, since senators must refrain from speaking during the trial proceedings.
At the White House, officials welcomed the Republican trial proposal.
“We are gratified that the draft resolution protects the president’s rights to a fair trial, and look forward to presenting a vigorous defense on the facts and the process as quickly as possible, and seeking an acquittal as swiftly as possible,” said White House Legislative Affairs Director Eric Ueland.
‘NOTHING WRONG’
The president’s legal team, in its first full filing for the impeachment court, argued that Trump did “absolutely nothing wrong” and urged the Senate to reject the “flawed” case against him.
“All of this is a dangerous perversion of the Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn,” the president’s lawyers wrote in the 171-page document. “The articles should be rejected and the president should immediately be acquitted.”
The White House document released Monday says the two charges against the president don’t amount to impeachable offenses. It asserts that the impeachment inquiry was never about finding the truth.
Central to the president’s defense outlined in the brief is the argument that Trump did not violate the law by withholding $391 million in taxpayer-funded assistance to Ukraine. Democrats say Trump used that aid as leverage to force a politically motivated investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
Trump’s lawyers do not deny that the president asked Ukraine to announce the investigations into Democrats, nor that he withheld military aid that Congress had approved for Kyiv. But Trump’s lawyers said that he never tied the investigations to a White House meeting or the security assistance.
They also argued that the president has the right to conduct relations with other countries as he sees fit, and that he had valid reasons to raise those issues with Ukraine and withhold the security aid: He wanted to root out corruption there and get other countries to share the burden of providing military assistance, the legal brief said.
Trump’s legal team argues that the House failed to find a witness who heard the president condition U.S. assistance on the investigation, instead basing their arguments on hearsay and assumptions by other witnesses. They contend that even if Trump were to have abused his power in withholding the Ukraine military assistance, it would not be impeachable because it did not violate a specific criminal statute.
However, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that Trump violated the law in withholding the aid. Trump’s lawyers, however, call that irrelevant, saying that it is not mentioned in the House’s charging document.
The president’s legal team also rejected arguments from Democrats that Trump undertook “an unprecedented campaign” to obstruct the congressional investigation into his conduct. They argue that the White House routinely blocks lawmakers from interviewing senior administration officials to preserve the president’s institutional rights, and that being removed from office for that would fundamentally change the separation of powers outlined in the U.S. Constitution.
If the Senate does vote to convict the president, the White House team argues, it would be an “‘unconstitutional conviction” because the articles of impeachment were too broad.
In their own filing Monday, House prosecutors issued fresh demands for a fair trial in the Senate.
“President Trump asserts that his impeachment is a partisan ‘hoax.’ He is wrong,” the prosecutors wrote.
The House Democrats said the president can’t have it both ways — rejecting the facts of the House case but also stonewalling congressional subpoenas for witnesses and testimony.
“Senators must honor their own oaths by holding a fair trial with all relevant evidence,” they wrote.
TRUMP IN DAVOS
Trump won’t be watching the impeachment trial from inside the Senate chamber or from the White House. He’ll be thousands of miles away, spending two days at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Administration officials say Trump remains focused on serving the public.
“The president’s work doesn’t stop just because of the impeachment sham,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in an email.
Trump departed Washington on Monday night. He said he’s going to Davos for the second time as president to encourage businesses to invest in the U.S.
“Our country is the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he said at the White House last week. “There’s nothing even close. I’ll be meeting the biggest business leaders in the world, getting them to come here.”
Trump was scheduled to arrive at the ski resort early today, give a speech and meet with world leaders and business executives.
The White House has not named any of the business leaders with whom Trump is set to meet. But he will hold talks with the leaders of Iraq, Pakistan, Switzerland and Iraq’s self-governing Kurdish region, as well as the forum’s founder, the White House said Monday.
Trump also will have his first meeting with the new European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman to hold the position.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Eric Tucker, Lisa Mascaro, Darlene Superville and Laurie Kellman of The Associated Press; by Justin Sink of Bloomberg News; and by Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.