WASHINGTON – The historic second impeachment trial of Donald Trump barreled toward a conclusion Saturday in record time, after a brief uproar over whether the Senate should hear testimony from a congresswoman about Trump refusing pleas to intervene during the Capitol riot.
“None of this would have happened without the president,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead House manager told the senators sitting in judgment in a chamber that was overrun by pro-Trump militants on Jan. 6.
And yet, he noted, Trump refused to appear at trial and explain his actions.
“If you were charged with inciting violent insurrection against our country, and you were falsely accused, would you come and testify? I know I would,” Raskin said.
The four hours of final arguments began just before noon, with a verdict expected later in the afternoon.
Acquittal was all but certain.
The vote to hear witness testimony was 55-45, and came out of the blue after a GOP congresswoman recounted a conversation during the riot in which Trump refused the House GOP leader’s plea to send help.
The surprise development paralyzed the Senate for two hours, with lawyers and senators huddling to figure out what to do next, or just milling around befuddled.
“If we do call witnesses, it’s not going to be one sided,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters. “If the Democrats want to open this Pandora’s box, I don’t think it’s going to work out well for them.”
Senate leaders had agreed to move to closing arguments without a delay for witness testimony. But House managers weren’t party to that deal and Friday night, Rep. Jaime Herrera Butler of Washington, one of the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment, revealed a damning conversation relayed to her by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
During the siege, she said, McCarthy pleaded by phone with Trump to intervene and he responded: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Cruz called it “hearsay or even double hearsay,” and the House managers’ efforts to call the congressman as a witness a Hail Mary.
“Leftist Twitter got really upset last night that they weren’t calling witnesses…. This is political theater and I think the House managers were feeling heat on their left flank,” he said.
After hours of haggling, with senators in both parties eager to get the ordeal behind them, a deal was struck. Raskin read Herrera’s statement on the Senate floor and both sides agreed to seek no other witnesses.
That call was just one of many pleas from besieged lawmakers, via social media and on TV, all ignored by Trump for hours.
“Did he quickly try to get in touch with or denounce the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, the Save America rally organizers and everyone on the extreme right and tell them that this was not what he had in mind? It’s a big mistake. Call it off?” Raskin asked. “No. He delighted in it. He reveled in it. He exalted in it. He could not understand why the people around him did not share his delight.”
Senators arrived at the Capitol in a freezing drizzle on Saturday expecting to move straight to closing arguments and an afternoon vote on the verdict on Day 5 of trial.
“We should close this case out today,” insisted Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen. “If they want to have witnesses, I’m going to need at least a hundred depositions, not just one.”
Trump’s lawyers threatened to depose Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others to find out what they knew ahead of time about threats to the Capitol.
Cruz agreed that Trump shouldn’t have to testify.
“There is a long tradition in our trials that is reflected in the Bill of Rights that any individual is not required to testify against themselves, to testify at their own trial I don’t think we should attempt to force the president to testify in his own impeachment trial,” he said.
Five Republicans did vote to move toward opening the trial to witnesses.
Throughout the trial, House managers faced dim prospects of prying loose the 17 Republican senators needed to convict the former president on the charge of inciting insurrection.
Trump’s lawyers spent just three hours Friday defending his conduct.
Echoing one of Trump’s favorite epithets, they called the impeachment a “politically motivated witch hunt” and rejected as “a preposterous and monstrous lie” the allegation that a “law and order president” could possibly have condoned or encouraged any violence, let alone the Jan. 6 assault on Congress.
House managers offered mounds of evidence to the contrary, showing a pattern of behavior by Trump to glorify political violence against his adversaries, from cheering a road rage incident in Texas involving his supporters and a Biden campaign bus to offering to pay the legal fees for rallygoers who punched protesters.
Just before the attack, Trump told supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump’s legal team argued that nothing he said or did ahead of that deadly riot, when thousands of his supporters swarmed in the hopes of blocking certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, amounted to incitement. And that nothing he did during or after the riot was relevant, since by then, the violence was already underway or ended.
Yes, he called them to “fight” and to “stop the steal,” but they insisted, such rhetoric is ordinary political speech and protected by his First Amendment rights.
The prosecution built its case not just on Trump’s incendiary remarks to an angry, combustible crowd just before the riot, but on the months of falsehoods he peddled, warning that the election would be stolen, and claiming afterward that it was, in fact, stolen.
Shortly before Saturday morning’s session began, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told fellow Republicans that he plans to vote for acquittal.
Until then he had kept his intentions opaque. His wife, Elaine Chao, was one of the Trump Cabinet members who resigned in protest after the riot.
So far during the trial, just six Republican senators had shown any inclination to hold Trump accountable for the insurrection on Jan. 6, far short of the number needed to help Democrats reach the two-thirds needed for conviction.
Only four of those six voted to move forward with witnesses, joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Trump’s staunchest defenders.
“If you want a delay, it will be a long one with many, many witnesses,” he tweeted.
More than 60 state and federal courts threw out Trump’s allegations of fraud and wrongdoing, with some judges, including some appointed by Trump himself, effectively laughing his claims out of court as utterly baseless and ludicrous.
But an impeachment is not scored on points. Unlike a criminal or civil trial, in which juries are expected to base a verdict on reasonable doubt or a preponderance evidence, impeachment is an inherently political exercise.
As Raskin reminded senators on Friday, the mechanism is meant to protect the Constitution and the republic, rather than to punish wrongdoing.
House Democrats knew going in that it would be a heavy lift to peel enough Republicans away from their loyalty to party, and set aside fears of Trump’s wrath and backlash from his ardent base.
The Republican Party remains the party of Trump. Even in defeat, and as the first president to try and stymie a peaceful transition of power, or face two impeachments, Trump continues to cast a dark and broad shadow over the GOP.
Cruz, Graham and Sen. Mike Lee met several times in a side room with Trump’s defense team during the trial, providing legal and strategic advice. Cruz rejected criticism that such consultations were inappropriate, noting that this is not an ordinary courtroom, where such conduct by a judge or jury would be egregiously out of bounds.
Trump’s lawyers also defended the consultations on grounds this isn’t an ordinary trial, though that didn’t stop van der Veen from thunderously complaining on Saturday about a lack of “due process,” referring to deposition rules familiar to him as a trial lawyer in Philadelphia.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have to appear at his law office in Philadelphia if he demands their depositions, van der Veen asserted, because “that’s the way it work, folks,” a claim that drew guffaws from senators on both sides.
That elicited laughter from senators in both parties that left him flustered, because that’s not the way it works in an impeachment trial.
Van der Veen told senators they can vote to acquit on any of several grounds: belief that an ex-president isn’t subject to the Senate jurisdiction, that the impeachment was unfair and lacked “due process,” and that whatever Trump said was protected by his free speech rights.
That neatly sidestepped the substance of the House case against Trump, that he stoked violence for months by lying about the election, lit the fuse the day of the riot, and proved his ill intent by refusing to call off his supporters or send troops to protect the Capitol, Congress and his own vice president from the mob.
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