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Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell is proposing to delay the start of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial by a week or more to give the former president time to consider the case.
House Democrats who voted to impeach Trump last week for instigating the Jan.6 attack on Capitol Hill signaled they wanted a speedy trial as President Joe Biden entered his term, saying a record complete was needed before the country – and Congress – could move on.
But McConnell told fellow GOP senators on Thursday that a short deadline would give Trump time to prepare and support his legal team, ensuring due process.
Indiana Senator Mike Braun said after the appeal that the trial may not begin “until mid-February.” He said this was “due to the fact that the process as it unfolded in the House has moved so rapidly and does not correspond to the time you need to prepare a defense in a Senate trial.” “.
The timing will be set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who can trigger the start of the trial when she sends charges of “incitement to insurgency” to the Senate, as well as McConnell and the new majority leader in the Senate. Senate, Chuck Schumer. , who are negotiating on how to set up a partisan 50-50 split in the Senate and the short-term agenda.
Schumer is in charge of the Senate, assuming the post of majority leader after Democrats won two new Senate seats in Georgia and Vice President Kamala Harris was sworn in on Wednesday. But with such a narrow divide, Republicans will have a say in how the trial proceeds.
Democrats hope to lead the debates while passing legislation that is a priority for Biden, including coronavirus relief, but they would also need the cooperation of Senate Republicans to do so.
Schumer told reporters on Thursday he was still negotiating with McConnell on how to conduct the trial, “but make no mistake about it. There will be a trial, there will be a vote, up or down, or whether to condemn the president.
Pelosi could send the article to the Senate as early as Friday. Democrats say proceedings should move quickly as they all witnessed the siege, many of them fleeing to safety as rioters descended on Capitol Hill.
“It will be soon, I don’t think it will be long, but we have to do it,” Pelosi said Thursday. She said Trump did not deserve a “jail release card” for his historic second indictment simply because he stepped down and Biden and others are calling for national unity.
Without the White House board office to defend him – as he did in his first trial last year – Trump allies have sought attorneys to plead the former president’s case. Members of his former legal teams have indicated they are not planning to join the effort, but South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told his GOP colleagues on Thursday that Trump is hiring the Carolina lawyer. South Butch Bowers, according to someone close to the call. granted anonymity to discuss it. Bowers did not immediately respond to a message on Thursday.
Pelosi’s nine impeachers, who meet regularly to discuss strategy, will pursue the case in the House. Pelosi said she would talk to them “in the coming days” about when the Senate might be ready for a trial, saying the decision could extend until next week.
Trump told thousands of supporters to “fight like hell” against the election results that Congress certified on Jan.6 just before an angry mob invited Capitol Hill and interrupted the count. Five people, including a Capitol Hill police officer, died in the chaos, and the House impeached the outgoing president a week later, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in backing him.
Pelosi said it would be “detrimental to unity” to forget that “people died here on January 6, in an attempt to undermine our elections, to undermine our democracy, to dishonor our Constitution.”
After his first indictment, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February after his White House legal team, aided by his personal lawyers, aggressively fought House accusations that he had encouraged the Ukrainian president. to investigate Biden in exchange for military aid. This time around, Pelosi noted, the House was not seeking to condemn the president for private conversations, but for a very public insurgency that she herself experienced and which took place on live television.
“This year the whole world has witnessed the president’s incitement,” Pelosi said.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second Democrat in the Senate, said it was still too early to know how long a trial would take or if Democrats would want to call witnesses. But he said, “You don’t need to tell us what was going on with the crowd scene – we were rushing up the stairs to escape.”
McConnell, who said this week that Trump “provoked” his supporters before the riot, did not say how he would vote. He told his GOP colleagues it would be a vote of conscience.
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