San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Californians’ role
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield emerges in a subplot that nearly derails the Senate impeachment trial, while Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla cast guilty votes.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy was nowhere near the Senate on the final day of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, but a phone call he made to the former president the day of the Capitol insurrection nearly derailed the proceeding.
As proTrump rioters stormed the building Jan. 6, the Bakersfield Republican pleaded with Trump to call off his supporters, according to a Republican House member from Washington state.
“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who said McCarthy had briefed her on the call.
That exchange, which Herrera Beutler originally told to a local paper shortly after the insurrection and was reported again late Friday by CNN, triggered a lastminute fight in Trump’s impeachment trial.
In a dizzying sequence of events Saturday, House prosecutors first won the right in the Senate to subpoena witnesses including Herrera Beutler, which could have added weeks to the trial, then acquiesced as Senate Democrats and Republicans cut a deal to enter Herrera Beutler’s remarks in the trial record instead.
Hours later, the Senate voted 5743 that Trump had incited the insurrection, 10 votes short of the twothirds needed for conviction. Both of California’s senators, Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, joined with all their party colleagues and seven Republicans in voting to convict.
Feinstein was among Democrats who said McCarthy’s phone call showed that Trump was not only aware of the violence as it unfolded at the Capitol, but that he had refused to intervene to protect Congress. Feinstein said it was proof the former president had sought and “guided” the insurrection, which resulted in five deaths.
“Despite direct pleas from members of Congress and the former president’s closest Republican confidants, Trump refused for hours to call off the mob or urge calm,” Feinstein said in a statement after the trial.
Padilla said the case against Trump was “abundantly clear” and criticized GOP senators for choosing “their loyalty to Donald Trump” in acquitting him.
The Democrats’ decision not to go forward with witnesses prompted fury among many progressives. House impeachment managers, who included Dublin Rep. Eric Swalwell, explained after the trial that entering Herrera Beutler’s statement in the record achieved their purpose and that no amount of witness testimony was likely to sway enough Republicans to convict.
Spokespeople for Feinstein and Padilla did not respond to queries about whether the senators supported the ultimate decision not to call witnesses.
A senior Democratic House aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to be free to describe the events, said that during a break after the vote to hear witnesses, Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons told House managers that the move could lose votes for conviction among Republicans and even some Democrats. “The jury is ready to vote,” Coons said, according to the aide.
Michael van der Veen, Trump’s attorney, said that although the former president’s lawyers agreed to let
Herrera Beutler’s statement about the call into the trial record, they did not agree about its “truthfulness.”
He also suggested that McCarthy disputed reports of the call, although the GOP leader has not commented publicly. His office did not respond to repeated requests from The Chronicle for comment.
Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump in January, said McCarthy had shared details of the call with her, including that Trump had initially repeated the falsehood that antifa activists were the ones attacking the Capitol.
“McCarthy refuted that and told Trump that these were Trump supporters,” she said.
When Trump told McCarthy that they must be “more upset about the election than you are,” the House GOP leader reportedly replied, “Who the f— do you think you are talking to?”