Trump acquitted by Senate
Romney’s only vote to cross party divide
WASHINGTON — After five months of hearings and investigations, the U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to acquit President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
In a pair of votes, the Senate fell well short of the twothirds margin that would have been needed to remove Trump, formally concluding the three-week-long trial of the 45th president.
The verdicts came down almost entirely upon party lines, with every Democrat voting “guilty” on both charges and Republicans voting to acquit on the obstruction-of-Congress charge. Only one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with his party to judge Trump guilty of abuse of power.
It was the third impeachment trial of a president and the third acquittal in American history.
“Senators, how say you?” Chief Justice John Roberts, the presiding officer, asked shortly after 4 p.m. in Washington. “Is the respondent, Donald John Trump, president of the United States, guilty or not guilty?”
Senators seated at their wooden desks stood one by one to deliver their verdicts of “guilty” or “not guilty.”
“It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is hereby, acquitted of the charges in said articles,” declared Roberts, after the second charge was defeated.
The verdict did not promise finality. Democratic leaders immediately insisted the result was illegitimate and promised to continue their investigations of Trump.
The acquittal follows a State of the Union address Tuesday night in which Trump pointed to the strong economy as vindication as he sought to move on from impeachment. The speech ended with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., tearing up a copy of Trump’s prepared remarks.
The tally in favor of conviction fell well below the
67-vote threshold necessary for removal on each article. The first charge was abuse of power, accusing Trump of a scheme to use the levers of government to coerce Ukraine to do his political bidding. It did not garner a majority vote, failing on a vote of 52-48. The second article, charging Trump with obstructing Congress for blocking House subpoenas and oversight requests, failed 53-47.
ROMNEY’S VOTE
Several Republicans said Trump was wrong to leverage U.S. aid to Ukraine to pressure a foreign leader to investigate his domestic political rival, but argued that it did not warrant a guilty verdict and ouster from office.
Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, voted to convict Trump of abuse of power, saying that the president’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was “the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.” He voted against the second article, but cast his first as a matter of conscience and became the first senator ever to vote to remove a president of his own party.
“I am sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters,” Romney said. “Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?”
Romney’s speech drew reactions from some Republicans, including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., who accused the senator of being “forever bitter” that he will never be president.
“He was too weak to beat the Democrats then so he’s joining them now,” Trump Jr. said in a tweet. “He’s now officially a member of the resistance & should be expelled from the GOP.”
Reps. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., and Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., echoed Trump Jr.’s argument. In tweets Wednesday afternoon, Zeldin and Gaetz branded the Utah Republican a “sore loser.”
“Mitt Romney absolutely despises that Donald Trump was elected POTUS & he was not,” Zeldin tweeted. “The sore loser mentality launched this sham impeachment & corruptly rigged & jammed it through the House. It looks like [Rep. Adam] Schiff recruited himself a sore loser buddy on the GOP side to play along.”
Shortly after the Senate vote, Trump wrote on Twitter that he would wait until noon today to appear at the White House “to discuss our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax.”
Brad Parscale, Trump’s presidential campaign manager, celebrated Wednesday’s vote, declaring in a statement that the president’s campaign “only got bigger and stronger as a result of this nonsense.”
The impeachment, he added, “will go down as the worst miscalculation in American political history.”
“President Trump has been totally vindicated and it’s now time to get back to the business of the American people,” Parscale said. “The do-nothing Democrats know they can’t beat him, so they had to impeach him.”
However, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer said there will always be “a giant asterisk next to the president’s acquittal” because of the Senate’s quick trial and Republicans’ unprecedented rejection of witnesses.
A few Republicans urged Trump to be more careful with his words in the future, particularly when speaking with foreign leaders, but there was no serious attempt to censure him as there was around the trial of former President Bill Clinton.
Both Clinton in 1999 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 drew cross-party support when they were left in office after impeachment trials. Richard Nixon resigned rather than face sure impeachment, expecting members of his own party to vote to remove him.
Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, two Republican swing votes who have tilted against the president in the past, both voted against conviction and removal. And two Democrats from traditionally red states, Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, voted to convict Trump, denying him a bipartisan acquittal.
Democrats, who had lobbied to include witnesses and documents that Trump shielded from the House in the Senate proceeding, wasted little time in declaring the trial a sham. Senators had been offered evidence, including testimony by the former national security adviser John Bolton, that would have further clarified the president’s actions and motivations, they said. All but two Republicans
The verdict did not promise finality. Democratic leaders immediately insisted the result was illegitimate and promised to continue their investigations of Trump.
refused, making the trial the first impeachment proceeding in American history to reach a verdict without calling witnesses.
At least one Democrat, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, acknowledged that his vote to convict would most likely contribute to his loss this fall in deeply conservative Alabama.
“There will be so many who will simply look at what I am doing today and say it is a profile in courage,” Jones said before the vote. “It is not. It is simply a matter of right and wrong.”
For now, the impeachment of Trump appears to have evenly divided the nation. Public opinion polls suggest that never more than half of the country agreed he should be removed from office.
The latest Gallup poll, released on Tuesday, showed that 49% of Americans approved of the job he was doing as president — the highest figure since he took office three years ago.
HOW IT HAPPENED
The possibility of impeachment has hung like a cloud over Trump’s presidency virtually since it began. But Pelosi had resisted when the special counsel released the findings of his investigation into Russian election interference in 2016 and possible collaboration with the Trump campaign. Impeachment was too divisive and unlikely to gain bipartisan support, she said then.
Her calculations changed in September when an anonymous CIA whistleblower accused the president of marshaling the powers of government to press Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and a theory that Democrats had colluded with Ukraine in the 2016 election. Authorizing the third impeachment inquiry in modern times, Pelosi set the House Intelligence Committee to investigate the scheme and build a case for impeachment.
Trump issued a directive to all government agencies not to comply with the inquiry — an order that gave rise to the obstruction-of-Congress charge.
Still, several U.S. diplomats and White House officials stepped forward, offering testimony in private and then in public hearings. On Dec. 18, the House voted to impeach Trump on both counts, despite their earlier pledges not to pursue a partisan impeachment.
To protect his Senate majority as much as the presidency, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, promised a swift acquittal and he delivered it. From the time the articles of impeachment were first read on the Senate floor to Wednesday’s vote was just 20 days. By comparison, the 1999 Clinton trial lasted five weeks and in 1868, the Senate took the better part of three months to try Johnson.
With acquittal never really in doubt, the real fight of the trial was over witnesses. Trump’s lawyers used their time on the Senate floor to argue that none were needed not only because the president’s behavior toward Ukraine was a legitimate expression of his concern about corruption there, but because neither charge constituted high crimes and misdemeanors.
Impeachment was seriously contemplated for a president only once in the first two centuries of the American republic; it now has been so three times since the 1970s, and two of the past four presidents have been impeached.
Roberts, as the rare court of impeachment came to a close, wished senators well in “our common commitment to the Constitution,” and hoped to meet again “under happier circumstances.”
Information for this article was contributed by Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times; by Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Zeke Miller and Padmananda Rama of The Associated Press; and by Felicia Sonmez, John Wagner and Colby Itkowitz of The Washington Post.