President Donald J. Trump is joined by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, upon his arrival Monday, Nov. 4, 2019, at the Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Ky. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Today, report the staff of the Morning Dispatch, begins the impeachment trial of President Trump in the Senate. They write (abridged):
As we wrote in Friday’s Morning Dispatch, last week’s hot impeachment topic concerned whether McConnell was likely to allow the Senate to subpoena its own witnesses or to consider new evidence that has cropped up since the House filed its articles of impeachment. McConnell’s proposed rules guarantee neither.
In a move that has Democrats howling, the proposed Senate rules will not even permit the House’s evidence to be entered in the Senate trial without a separate vote—
“House Democrats have not presented any evidence that the president made any linkage between either a meeting or the security assistance and the investigation that House Democrats claim,” an official working with the president’s legal team told reporters on a White House conference call Monday.
“The facts show that the president was not pressuring anyone to do anything about any investigation.”
The White House will rely heavily on McConnell to keep things running smoothly and quickly.
“To impeach a president, to remove a president from office, an impeachable offense has to be a violation of established law,” he said.
“So anything that you might describe, that you might call an abuse of power because you think that it was bad, and that it wasn’t the right use of power, that’s not sufficient. There has to be a violation of established law.”
Read more here.
