Impeachment articles delivered as GOP wavers
Democrats building incitement case around Trump’s words to supporters
WASHINGTON — The House on Monday formally delivered an article of impeachment charging former president Donald Trump with inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, and Democrats prepared to use his own words as evidence against him in his Senate trial next month.
With solemn looks on their mask-covered faces, the nine House impeachment managers walked over to the Senate shortly after 7 p.m. Monday to deliver the article against Trump, setting in motion his second Senate impeachment trial.
While no final decisions on trial strategy have been made, House managers are concentrating on building their case around Trump personally — what he said in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack and at a rally that day, and how his words were interpreted in the White House and outside it, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
The impeachment managers and their advisers have been meeting daily, scouring hundreds of hours of evidence — including footage scraped from the conservative Parler and other social media sites — to build an elaborate timeline that is being constantly updated, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions.
One idea under consideration: to produce a video that highlights how the rioters reacted to Trump’s remarks that day and that shows footage of the violent mob inside the building.
At the same time, allies of Trump are growing bullish that as more time passes since the fatal siege, the momentum in favor of convicting the former president and permanently barring him from public office is fading.
“There are only a handful of Republicans and shrinking who will vote against him,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has been advising Trump on the upcoming proceedings.
Trump’s coming Senate trial, which is not set to begin in
earnest until Feb. 9, has ensured that the remnants of the Trump presidency are hanging over the first days of President Joe Biden’s tenure, complicating his immediate agenda on Capitol Hill such as confirmation of his Cabinet and passage of a massive pandemic relief package.
Biden and his aides have assiduously avoided getting involved in the political morass of impeachment surrounding his predecessor, though the trial is likely to consume all of the oxygen in Washington once opening arguments begin next month.
Senators will be sworn in as jurors on Tuesday, when
Trump will receive the official summons.
But the official trial proceedings will be delayed until the week of Feb. 8 under a delayed timeline first proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and later approved by Biden.
Several Republican senators, including McConnell, have made it clear that they would consider voting to convict Trump. But it is improbable that at least 17 GOP senators would favor doing so.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Monday that Democrats, in pursuing impeachment against Trump, were being “sore winners” and that there were not enough Republicans who would vote to convict him.
“Why are we doing this?” he added.
Three Republicans were on the Senate floor Monday evening when the House managers arrived to deliver the article of impeachment: McConnell, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas.
“President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead impeachment manager, said on the Senate floor, reading the article. “He threatened the integrity of the Democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power and imperiled a coequal branch of government.”
Senior GOP officials said they expected at least one Senate Republican to move to dismiss the charge against Trump quickly, though such a vote would serve primarily as an early litmus test of how receptive GOP senators would be to arguments that Trump fomented the riot at the Capitol and that he should be permanently barred from public office because of it.
The party remains split over how fiercely to back Trump during the impeachment, with Republican Party committee members debating whether to pass a resolution on the former president’s behalf over a long email thread throughout the weekend. A number of them have been pushing for a formal resolution of support of the former president.
The debate over whether to back the president and the resolution ended when Henry Barbour, a GOP committee member from Mississippi, asked that the conversation be taken o±ine, according to people familiar with the emails.