The
US Senate has voted to acquit President Donald Trump of impeachment
charges brought by the House Democrats, ending the attempt to oust him
from the White House ahead of the November 2020 elections.
The
process kicked off in September 2019, over allegations that Trump
improperly sought foreign influence in the 2020 election by demanding a
corruption investigation in Ukraine.
Last week, the Senate
rejected a proposal by Democrats to call additional witnesses, in a
49-51 vote that saw Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah)
cross the aisle. The president’s lawyers argued that all the relevant
testimonies and documents should have been produced during the
proceedings in the House, which ended on December 18, 2019 with a
partisan vote to impeach Trump.
No House Republicans supported
the articles of impeachment. They were joined by two Democrats who voted
against the first article and three who voted against the second, while
another – presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) – voted
“present” on both.
Even though the Democrats argued that
impeachment was necessary because Trump was a “clear and present danger”
to “our democracy,” House Speaker Nancy then waited four weeks to send
the case to the Senate.
There, Democrats argued that additional
witnesses were needed to establish the exact circumstances of Trump’s
decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine in order to – they claimed –
pressure the government in Kiev into investigating a political rival
ahead of the 2020 election.
The claim originated with an unnamed
intelligence community “whistleblower,” who alerted House Intelligence
Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-California) of the phone call between
Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019. Schiff
and his team of impeachment managers argued that Trump withholding the
aid was an attempt at pressuring Kiev into investigating corruption at
Burisma, a gas company that had hired the son of Vice President Joe
Biden in 2014.
Biden is now one of the candidates for the 2020
presidential nomination, and Democrats argued this amounted to foreign
interference in the election. Calling this an abuse of power, Democrats
also charged Trump with “obstruction of Congress” for invoking executive
privilege and refusing to allow some of the White House officials to
testify in impeachment proceedings.
Trump’s lawyers argued that
Schiff’s subpoenas had no validity until the House voted to actually
authorize the impeachment process, on October 31. They also said that
the president’s actions were perfectly consistent with his
constitutional authority, that investigating Burisma did not amount to
Ukrainian interference in US elections, and that Trump was denied due
process rights because Democrats did not give the Republican minority a
hearing day or the right to call their own witnesses
The
acquittal comes a day after Trump’s triumphant State of the Union
speech, and the embarrassing fiasco of the Democrats’ caucuses in Iowa,
where even according to incomplete and questionable results, Biden ended
up fourth.
Trump is only the third US president ever to be
impeached in the House, after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in
1999. In all three cases, the impeachment failed in the Senate,
allowing the president to stay in office. Contrary to popular opinion,
Richard Nixon was never impeached – he resigned before the official
proceedings could begin, in August 1973.
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