President Trump’s staunchest allies sought on Sunday to stave off a trial for him in the Senate over the storming of the U.S Capitol by a mob of his supporters, while Democrats demanded he be held accountable for what one called the “most dangerous crime by a president ever committed against the United States.”
Three days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Trump remained out of public view, sequestered in the White House while thousands of National Guard troops cordoned off a huge swath of official Washington, including the stately Capitol building on whose steps Biden will take the oath of office Wednesday.
Against that tense backdrop, Democrats insisted that the president’s impending departure from the Oval Office did not negate his role in the Jan. 6 rampage by extremist Trump partisans seeking to halt formal congressional affirmation of Biden’s election victory. House Democrats, joined by 10 Republicans, impeached Trump last week, alleging he incited the mob to storm the Capitol.
timetable to argue that Trump should not be tried in the Senate as a private citizen.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who will serve as lead impeachment manager, vehemently rejected the notion that Trump’s departure offered a shield for acts committed during his waning days in office.
“I don’t think anybody would seriously argue that we should establish a precedent where every president, on the way out the door, has two weeks or three weeks or four weeks to try to incite an armed insurrection against the union,” Raskin said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The lawmaker called Trump’s whipping up of insurrectionists with his false claim of a stolen election “the most serious presidential crime in the history of the United States of America, the most dangerous crime by a president ever committed against the United States.”
Raskin said he did not know when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would deliver the single article of impeachment to the Senate, which will revert to Democratic control on Wednesday, but said it “should be coming up soon.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is reprising his role as an ardent Trump defender after breaking with him over the Capitol siege, said it would be “insane at every level” to press ahead with a Senate trial after the president’s term had ended.
“This has never been done in the history of our country — I think it is blatantly unconstitutional,” Graham said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The South Carolina Republican on Sunday sent a letter to incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), calling on him to dismiss the article of impeachment once it is received in the Senate to promote national “healing.”
That drew a sarcastic retort from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank). “Now Graham calls for unity. I agree,” Schiff tweeted. “Let’s unite in removing Trump from office and disqualify him from [ever] holding a public trust again.”
Los. Angeles Times
NewsAnnexOnline 