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Week 155 in Trump – Impeachment News

Posted on January 21, 2020 in Impeachment, Trump

I‘m still catching up from the holidays, so this is my latest impeachment recap from two weeks ago.

Here’s what happened on the impeachment front for the week ending January 12…

General Happenings:

  1. John Bolton says he’ll testify in the impeachment trial if the Senate subpoenas him. He doesn’t respond when asked if he’d testify if the House subpoenas him again. Trump says he’ll invoke executive privilege if the Senate subpoenas Bolton.
  2. The Senate isn’t likely to call any witnesses unless Democrats can get at least four Republicans to agree to it.
  3. Mitch McConnell says he won’t commit to calling new witnesses or admit new evidence. He says he has the votes to approve trial rules without any votes from Democrats.
    • Factcheck: Republicans have been saying that there were no witnesses in the Clinton trial. I don’t know where they got that idea. The Senate voted to table the question of witnesses at the start of the trial (just like now), and then later voted to call witnesses. After deposing three witnesses, the Senate voted to use the depositions instead of having them appear in the Senate.
  1. McConnell signs on to Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) resolution to dismiss the articles of impeachment for failure to prosecute (implying that the House didn’t do its job).
    • Hawley brought up the resolution because Nancy Pelosi still has the articles of impeachment and is waiting to find out the rules of the Senate trial so she can appoint the House managers for the trial.
    • It doesn’t look like the resolution made it to a vote, and it would require a two-thirds vote to pass unless McConnell uses the nuclear option.
  1. A majority of Americans want Trump’s top aides who were involved in the Ukraine issue to testify.
  2. A few Democrats in the Senate call on Pelosi to hand over the articles of impeachment, but Pelosi says she’ll send them to the Senate next week. She asks Jerry Nadler to name the impeachment managers.
  3. The State Department has yet another high-level defection. Michael McKinley, a career diplomat and senior advisor to Mike Pompeo, resigns. McKinley was disappointed in Pompeo’s lack of public support for his diplomats.
  4. Trump and McConnell meet in private to discuss the details of the Senate trial. Their offices have been working together to determine the structure of the trial. So much for a system of checks and balances.

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