McConnell says he’s not ruling out witnesses in impeachment trial

PALM BEACH, Fla. —  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that he was not ruling out calling witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial — but indicated he was in no hurry to seek new testimony either — as lawmakers remain at an impasse over the form of the trial by the GOP-controlled Senate.

The House voted Wednesday to impeach Trump, who became only the third president in U.S. history to be formally charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But the Senate trial may be held up until lawmakers can agree on how to proceed. Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is demanding trial witnesses who refused to appear during House committee hearings, including acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security advisor John Bolton.

McConnell, who has all but promised a swift acquittal of the president, has resisted making any guarantees, and has cautioned Trump against seeking the testimony of witnesses he desires for fear of elongating the trial. Instead, he appears to have secured GOP support for his plans to impose a framework drawn from the 1999 impeachment trial of President Clinton.

“We haven’t ruled out witnesses,” McConnell said Monday in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” “We’ve said let’s handle this case just like we did with President Clinton. Fair is fair.”

That trial featured a 100-0 vote on arrangements that established two weeks of presentations and argument before a partisan tally in which Republicans, who held the majority, called a limited number of witnesses. But Democrats now would need Republican votes to secure witness testimony — and Republicans believe they have the votes to eventually block those requests.

In a letter Monday to all senators, Schumer argued that the circumstances in the Trump trial are different from those of Clinton’s, who was impeached after a lengthy independent counsel investigation in which witnesses had already testified numerous times under oath. Schumer rejected the Clinton model, saying waiting until after the presentations to decide on witnesses would “foreclose the possibility of obtaining such evidence because it will be too late.”

Schumer also demanded that the Senate, in addition to receiving testimony, also compel the Trump administration to turn over documents and emails relevant to the case, including the decision to withhold military assistance from Ukraine.

Schumer told the Associated Press on Monday that he stands ready to negotiate with McConnell, and that he hopes questions about witnesses can be settled “right at the beginning.” Without witnesses, he said, any trial would be “Kafkaesque.”

“Let’s put it like this: If there are no documents and no witnesses, it will be very hard to come to an agreement,” Schumer said.

If McConnell won’t agree, “We can go to the floor and demand votes, and we will,” he added.

Schumer told AP the Democrats aren’t trying to delay the proceedings, saying the witnesses and the documents his party is asking for are directly relevant to the charges in the House impeachment articles.

Meanwhile, the White House is projecting confidence that it will prevail in a constitutional spat with Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has delayed sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate in hopes of giving Schumer more leverage in talks with McConnell. But the White House believes Pelosi won’t be able to hold out much longer.

“She will yield. There’s no way she can hold this position,” Marc Short, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said Sunday. “We think her case is going nowhere.”

The impasse between the Senate leaders leaves open the possibility of a protracted delay until the articles are delivered.

Schumer told reporters in New York on Sunday that “the Senate is yearning to give President Trump due process, which means that documents and witnesses should come forward. What is a trial with no witnesses and no documents? It’s a sham trial.”

Trump has called the holdup “unfair” and claimed that Democrats were violating the Constitution, as the delay threatened to prolong the pain of impeachment and cast uncertainty on the timing of the vote Trump is set to claim as vindication.

“Pelosi gives us the most unfair trial in the history of the U.S. Congress, and now she is crying for fairness in the Senate, and breaking all rules while doing so,” Trump tweeted Monday from his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., where he is on a more than two-week holiday vacation. “She lost Congress once, she will do it again!”

Short called Pelosi’s delay unacceptable, saying she’s “trampling” Trump’s rights to “rush this through, and now we’re going to hold it up to demand a longer process in the Senate with more witnesses.”

“If her case is so airtight ... why does she need more witnesses to make her case?” Short said.

White House officials have also taken to highlighting Democrats’ arguments that removing Trump was an “urgent” matter before the House impeachment vote, as they seek to put pressure on Pelosi to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate.

A close Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said Pelosi would fail in her quest “to get Mitch McConnell to bend to her will to shape the trial.” Graham is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was a House manager, comparable to a prosecutor, during the Senate’s impeachment trial of Clinton.

“She’ll eventually send the articles because public opinion will crush the Democrats,” said Graham. Asked whether he expected witnesses in the Senate, he replied: : “No, I don’t.”

At one point, Trump had demanded the testimony of witnesses of his own, such as Democrats Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and the intelligence community whistleblower whose summer complaint sparked the impeachment probe. But he has since relented after concerted lobbying by McConnell and other Senate Republicans who pushed him to accept the swift acquittal from the Senate and not to risk injecting uncertainty into the process by calling witnesses.

The Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said his party is looking for a signal from McConnell that he hasn’t ruled out new witnesses and documents. But Durbin acknowledged that Democrats may not have much leverage in pushing a deal.

He criticized both Republican and Democratic senators who have already announced how they will vote in the trial, saying the Constitution requires senators to act as impartial jurors. Republicans hold a 53-vote majority in the Senate.

“The leverage is our hope that four Republican senators will stand up, as 20 years ago, we saw in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and say, this is much bigger than our current political squabbles,” Durbin said.

The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict in an impeachment trial — and Republicans have expressed confidence that they have more than enough votes to keep Trump in office.

Short spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” Durbin appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and Graham was on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”