ACQUITTED AGAIN
7 Republicans side with Democrats, but tally falls 10 votes short of convicting Trump
AWASHINGTON» Senate still bruised from the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries acquitted former President Donald Trump on Saturday in his second impeachment trial, as all but a few Republicans locked arms to reject a case that he incited the Jan. 6 rampage
in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power.
Under the watch of National Guard troops still patrolling the historic building, a bipartisan majority voted to find Trump guilty of the House’s single charge of incitement of insurrection. They included seven Republicans, more members of a president’s party than have ever returned an adverse verdict in an impeachment trial.
But with most of Trump’s party coalescing
around him, the 57-43 tally fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict him and to allow the Senate to move to disqualify him from holding future office.
Among the Republicans breaking ranks to find guilty the man who led their party for four tumultuous years, demanding absolute loyalty, were Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt
Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania.
The verdict brought an abrupt end to the fourth presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history, and the only one in which the accused had left office before being tried. But it was unlikely to be the final word for Trump, his badly divided party, or the sprawling criminal and congressional investigations into the assault.
It left behind festering wounds in Washington and around the country after a 39-day stretch unlike any in the nation’s history — encompassing a deadly riot at the Capitol, an impeachment of one president, the inauguration of another and a rancorous trial in the Senate.
It took only five days to reach a verdict, partly because Democrats and Republicans were united in their desire to avoid a prolonged proceeding and partly because Trump’s allies made clear before it even began that they were not prepared to hold him responsible. Most of the jury of senators had themselves witnessed the events that gave rise to the charge, having fled for their own lives, along with the vice president, as the mob closed in last month while they met to formalize President Joe Biden’s victory.
Party leaders and even the president’s most loyal supporters in the Senate did not defend his actions — a monthslong campaign, seeded with election lies, to overturn his decisive loss to Biden that culminated when Trump told thousands of his supporters to “fight like hell” and they did. Instead, in the face of a meticulous case brought by nine House prosecutors, they found safe harbor in technical arguments that the trial itself was not valid because Trump was no longer in office.
But their overriding political calculation was clear. After party leaders briefly entertained using the process to purge Trump from their ranks, Republicans doubled down on a bet made five years ago: that it was better not to stoke another open confrontation with a man millions of their voters still singularly embrace.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader, embodied the tortured balancing act, denouncing Trump on Saturday minutes after voting to acquit him for a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” In blistering remarks from the Senate floor, McConnell, who had openly considered voting to convict Trump, effectively argued that he was guilty as charged, while arguing that there was nothing the Senate could do about it.
Minutes after the verdict, Trump, barred from Twitter, broke an uncharacteristic silence he had maintained during the trial with a defiant statement issued from his post-presidential home in Florida, calling the proceeding “yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.”
He expressed no remorse for his actions, and strongly suggested that he planned to continue to be a force in politics for a long time to come.
“In the months ahead I have much to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people,” Trump said.
The “not guilty” verdict left him free to run for office again, but it remained unclear whether he could recover after he became the first president to seriously threaten the peaceful transfer of power. Public polling suggests Republicans have pulled their support in droves since the events of last month, but an acquittal is likely to empower Trump with the party’s activist base and further stoke the party’s gaping divisions.
Democrats condemned the verdict but intended to quickly turn Washington’s focus to the new president’s ambitious legislative agenda and the coronavirus pandemic passing grim new milestones each day. The outcome promised to leave Biden, who took office pledging to “end this uncivil war,” with the monumental task of moving the nation past one of its most violent and turbulent chapters since the 19th century.
But that did not mean party leaders were willing to forgo a potential political advantage. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly batted down the idea of a bipartisan censure resolution, saying it would let “cowardly senators” off the hook and constitute “a slap in the face of the Constitution.”
The vote came hours after the trial briefly dissolved into chaos when House prosecutors made, then dropped, a surprise demand for witnesses who could reveal what the former president was doing as the assault unfolded.
Instead, the two legal teams agreed to admit as evidence a written statement by a Republican congresswoman who has said she was told that the former president sided with the mob as rioters were attacking the Capitol.
With the outcome a foregone conclusion, the trial itself became an illuminating act for history, clarifying the scope of the violence that occurred.
It could scarcely have been more different than Trump’s first trial a year ago. Then, the House tried to make its case around an esoteric plot to pressure Ukraine to smear Biden, and it failed largely on party lines.
But over five days this week, the House managers put forward in harrowing detail an account of a horror that had played out in plain sight. Using graphic video and sophisticated visual aids, they made clearer than ever before how close the armed mob had come to a dangerous confrontation with then-Vice President Mike Pence and the members of the House and the Senate.
All of it, the prosecutors argued, was the doing of Trump, who spread lies that the election had been stolen from him, cultivated outrage among his followers, encouraged violence, tried to pressure state election officials to overturn democratically decided results and finally assembled and unleashed a mob of his supporters — who openly planned a bloody last stand — to “stop the steal.” With no signs he was remorseful, they warned he could ignite a repeat if allowed to seek office again.
“If that is not ground for conviction, if that is not a high crime and misdemeanor against the Republic and the United States of America, then nothing is,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead manager, said as he summed up his case. “President Trump must be convicted, for the safety and democracy of our people.”
After stumbling out of the gate earlier in the week with meandering presentations, Trump’s legal team delivered the president a highly combative and exceedingly brief defense on Friday. Calling the House’s charge a “preposterous and monstrous lie,” they insisted over just three hours that the former president was a “law and order”-loving leader who never meant for his followers to take the words “fight like hell” literally, and could not have foreseen the violence that followed.’
“They were not trying a case,” Michael T. van der Veen, a member of the hastily assembled legal team, said of Democrats in his own closing remarks. “They were telling a political tale, a fable, and a patently false one at that.”
They also offered more technical arguments aimed at giving Republicans refuge for acquittal, arguing that it was not constitutional for the Senate to try a former president and that Trump’s election lies and bellicose words to his supporters could not be deemed incitement because the First Amendment protected his right to speak freely.
The seven Republicans who rejected those arguments in favor of conviction were an ideologically diverse group at various stages of their political careers. Burr and Toomey plan to retire next year. Cassidy, Collins and Sasse were just reelected, and Romney and Murkowski are among Trump’s most durable Republican critics.
L OS ANGELE S » Over the New Year’s holiday, the grown children of two immigrant families called 911 to report that their fathers were having difficulty breathing. The men, born in Mexico and living 3 miles from each other in the United States, both had diabetes and high blood pressure. They both worked low-wage, essential jobs — one a minibus driver, the other a cook. And they both had not realized how sick they were.
Three weeks later, the men — Emilio Virgen, 63, and Gabriel Flores, 50 — both died from COVID-19. Their stories were hauntingly familiar at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, the hardest-hit hospital proportionately in the hardest-hit county in the state now leading the nation in cases and that just surpassed New York with the highest death toll. In the intensive care unit on Jan. 21, Virgen became No. 207 on the hospital’s list of COVID-19 fatalities; Flores, just down the hall, became No. 208.
The New York Times spent more than a week inside the hospital, during a period when nearly one-quarter of all COVID inpatients there were dying, despite advances in knowledge of the disease. That rise coincided with a surge of cases in Southern California, a doubling of the mortality rate in Los Angeles hospitals overall and the spread of a new local strain that may be more transmissible than the more prevalent one.
Eight out of 10 of those who died at MLK Hospital were Hispanic, a group with the highest COVID-19 death rates in L.A. County, followed by Black residents. County data also showed that the most impoverished L.A. residents, many of them around the hospital in South L.A., are dying of the disease at four times the rate of the wealthiest.
For MLK’s chief executive, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the inequities in disease and death from COVID reflect those long present in the community. Patients come from what she termed a “medical desert,” with acute shortages of primary care doctors and other health services.
In the best of times, her small institution cannot match what many other hospitals offer, from caring for preemies to major heart attack victims. Now, amid the pandemic, the hospital cannot test experimental therapies, cannot draw on a large pool of specialized staff in a surge and cannot offer last-chance care on an external lung machine.
During the peak, MLK treated more COVID patients than L.A. hospitals three to four times its size. Batchlor has pleaded with the governor for help, tried to shame other institutions into accepting transfers of patients and spoken out about the failings of U.S. health care.
“We’ve created a separate and unequal hospital system and a separate and unequal funding system for low-income communities,” she said. “And now with COVID, we’re seeing the disproportionate impact.”
Dge megacu oe “Cimme” Cing”
When the ambulance crew picked up Virgen, they told his family he was going to nearby St. Francis Medical Center, a large private hospital with a slate of specialized services.
But when his older daughter, Eunice Virgen, a 35-year-old social worker, called to check, he was not there. The facility was filled to capacity with the COVID surge, she was eventually told, and had turned the ambulance away. Her father instead went to MLK, which is less than half the size of St. Francis and had dozens more COVID inpatients that week, according to federal records.
Virgen was incredulous; she thought of MLK as “Killer King,” the derisive nickname of its troubled predecessor, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, a public hospital that had served some of the lowest-income neighborhoods of L.A.
Emilio Virgen and his wife, Lizette, lived about 6 miles away in a modest stucco town house just outside the city line.
The family first called 911 on New Year’s Eve, more than a week after Emilio Virgen’s children believe he was exposed to the coronavirus attending a Sunday service and lunch at a small evangelical
church in a strip mall. Within days, the pastor was ill, along with most other attendees; two later died.
Three of Virgen’s children had repeatedly begged him not to go to services.
Dismissing his family’s concerns, Virgen invoked his faith. “I’m going to be fine,” Eunice Virgen recalled him saying. “The blood of Jesus will cover me.”
Awaiting the ambulance, Emilio Virgen had been hunched over gasping for air. He had high blood pressure and diabetes, risk factors for severe consequences of the virus. But when the paramedics examined him, his oxygen level was normal. Hospitals were so jammed that he was likely to wait 10 to 12 hours before being admitted, they warned. So his family kept him home.
On Jan. 6, a fingertip oxygen monitor Virgen’s younger daughter, Tiffany, 25, had ordered showed that her father’s oxygen levels were in the 60s, far below the normal range in the 90s. That was a sign of “silent hypoxia,” when dangerously low oxygen levels fail to cause extreme shortness of breath. She called 911 again.
After Emilio Virgen was sent to MLK, his older daughter asked a physician friend if she should try to get him transferred to a hospital such as Cedars-Sinai, a large medical center famous for treating celebrities. Her father’s job provided health insurance, so he did not need to depend on a safety-net institution. But the friend reassured her that the new MLK hospital was nothing like the old one.
MLK hospital offers limited services: emergency surgery only (most commonly amputations for diabetes patients), no pediatric care, no neonatal intensive care, no trauma center, and no inpatient psychiatric or addiction treatment. For many medical problems, patients had to go elsewhere. Other institutions often rejected them, though, because only 4% of MLK patients had private insurance, which typically reimburses care at higher rates than public insurers.
Flores, a father of three who arrived in MLK’s emergency room on New Year’s Day, was a typical patient. An immigrant from Mexico living in the country without legal permission, he worked long hours as a restaurant cook. He had
diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, the top three high-risk conditions among MLK’s COVID inpatients, and relied on the state’s Medicaid coverage for health emergencies.
Flores’ oldest child, Manuel, 24, asked whether his father could get convalescent plasma, a therapy that won federal approval last summer for emergency use. The family knew people who had been transfused with it and survived. But MLK did not offer the treatment, which studies have suggested may be effective when given early in someone’s illness.
It was unclear how long Gabriel Flores had been infected with the coronavirus. He and his 8-year-old son had felt achy and feverish shortly before Christmas. Soon his wife, Gabriela, had symptoms, too. After the family went to Dodger Stadium for testing, only hers came back positive.
Weeks later, the county halted the use of the Curative oral swab tests the family had been given. The Food and Drug Administration had alerted providers to the risk of false negative results with the test, which could delay treatment and increase the virus’ spread.
While MLK did not offer convalescent plasma to patients, it did have a similar, more targeted treatment: monoclonal antibodies. It should be given when someone is mildly ill, not requiring oxygen or hospitalization, according to federal guidelines. MLK has administered just over 140 doses to emergency room patients and found evidence that it reduced the chances they would return seriously ill, according to hospital data.
But MLK has not promoted community awareness of the therapy. “If we publicize it,” said Dr. K. Kevin Park, a vice president for medical affairs, “we wouldn’t be able to handle” the volume if many people showed up. The treatment requires an hour-long infusion and another hour of observation, creating additional demands for space and staff.
“Ie’”e lind oe out oe t”icls”
The day after he was hospitalized, Flores was transferred to the ICU. Doctors believed his only chance of survival was to go on a
ventilator. But he had a “Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate” order on his chart because he had heard that people on ventilators with COVID “were just passing away,” his adult son, Manuel Flores, later said.
Refusing intubation was most common among the hospital’s male Hispanic patients, according to Dr. Jason Prasso, an ICU doctor. “They say, ‘If it’s my time, I don’t want to be on a ventilator for three weeks before I die.’ ”
Still, 86% of COVID patients who had been intubated at MLK had died, according to hospital statistics.
The medical team invited Flores’ wife to the hospital, usually closed to visitors during the pandemic. She found her husband frightened and shaking. He was not getting enough oxygen, a doctor explained, and without a ventilator he could die in two days. Flores told her he wanted to go home, then changed his mind. He was exhausted and had chest pain, he said. He would try the ventilator because he wanted to live longer for his family.
Still, his oxygen levels remained low. Doctors gave him steroids and drugs that counter blood clots. They turned him on his stomach and even paralyzed him for periods to help the ventilator work more effectively. But nothing seemed to make a difference. Flores had “cut-and-dried COVID pulmonary failure,” Prasso said.
Some COVID patients have one last option: treatment using a machine that gives the lungs a chance to rest and, hopefully, repair. The procedure, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, is typically offered only in larger hospitals.
Flores might have been a candidate for it at one point, according to Dr. Christopher Ortiz, a critical care specialist from UCLA, a topranked hospital, who pitched in at MLK. But Prasso said he had stopped considering the treatment. Earlier in the pandemic, he had pushed to transfer some MLK patients to hospitals providing ECMO but finally gave up.
“We’ve never been successful,” he said. “Nobody wants their insurance.”
One morning just before rounds, Flores’ roommate died. His own
condition was perilous. That afternoon, a code blue was called for him. His oxygen levels were in the 70s. His kidneys were failing. His heart was beating in the 140s, its upper chambers fibrillating. The team shocked him to restore a normal rhythm.
Prasso could not think of much more to do. “We’re kind of out of tricks,” he said. He called Flores’ wife to warn that the situation was grave. He and the other ICU doctors delivered such news multiple times a day.
That evening, Flores’ wife and his older son came to visit him. Gabriela Flores held her husband’s hand and stroked his forehead. “Mi amor,” she repeated. “Te amo.”
Down the hallway, Virgen, the minibus driver, was also unconscious on a ventilator. After initially improving, his condition had suddenly declined.
Like Gabriel Flores, he had developed acute kidney injury, a common complication of severe COVID that can require temporary dialysis to replace the work of the kidneys. MLK had only three machines to deliver continuous dialysis, a form of the treatment used for the most unstable ICU patients. That forced the hospital to prioritize whom to put on the machines — and for how long — and to manage other patients with medications.
Doctors managed Virgen’s kidney failure conservatively, without needing to use dialysis. But as other problems developed, they told his family he did not have long. On a Zoom call Jan. 20, with a tablet computer next to his bed, his children tried to reassure one another that they had done everything they could and lamented how quickly he had declined.
“I don’t want to say goodbye,” Tiffany Virgen told her siblings. “I don’t want to live a life without him.”
“He was my strong, Mexican, tall, handsome dad,” said her sister, Eunice Virgen, crying. “He thought he was invincible. He thought he was Superman.”
Early the next morning, they lost him. Five hours and five minutes later, Flores also died.