NATION
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
McConnell not ruling out witnesses in
President Trump’s impeachment trial
By ZEKE MILLER
Associated Press
PALM BEACH, Fla.
— Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell said Mon-
day that he was not rul-
ing out calling witnesses in
President Donald 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-con-
trolled Senate.
The House voted Wednes-
day to impeach Trump, who
became only the third pres-
ident in U.S. history to be
formally charged with “high
crimes and misdemean-
ors.” But the Senate trial
may be held up until law-
makers can agree on how to
proceed. Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer is demand-
ing witnesses who refused to
appear during House com-
mittee hearings, including
acting White House chief
of staff Mick Mulvaney and
former national security
adviser John Bolton.
McConnell, who has all
but promised a swift acquit-
tal of the president, has
resisted making any guar-
antees, and has cautioned
Trump against seeking the
testimony of witnesses he
desires for fear of elongating
the trial. Instead, he appears
to have secured Republi-
can support for his plans to
impose a framework drawn
from the 1999 impeach-
ment trial of President Bill
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 Presi-
dent Clinton. Fair is fair.”
That trial featured a
100-0 vote on arrangements
that established two weeks
of presentations and argu-
ment before a partisan tally
in which Republicans, who
held the majority, called a
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky,
speaks with reporters after walking off the Senate floor last
week on Capitol Hill in Washington.
limited number of witnesses.
But Democrats now would
need Republican votes to
secure witness testimony
— and Republicans believe
they have the votes to even-
tually block those requests.
In a letter Monday to all
senators, Schumer argued
that the circumstances in
the Trump trial are differ-
ent from that of Clinton,
who was impeached after a
lengthy independent coun-
sel investigation in which
witnesses had already testi-
fied numerous times under
oath. Schumer rejected the
Clinton model, saying wait-
ing until after the presenta-
tions to decide on witnesses
would “foreclose the possi-
bility of obtaining such evi-
dence because it will be too
late.”
Schumer also demanded
that the Senate, in addition
to receiving testimony, also
compel the Trump admin-
istration to turn over docu-
ments and emails relevant
to the case, including on the
decision to withhold military
assistance from Ukraine.
Schumer told The Asso-
ciated Press on Monday that
he stands ready to negotiate
with McConnell, and that he
hopes questions about wit-
nesses 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 agree-
ment,” 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, say-
ing the witnesses and the
documents his party is ask-
ing for are directly relevant
to the charges in the House
impeachment articles.
Meanwhile, the White
House is projecting confi-
dence 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 Presi-
dent Mike Pence, told “Fox
News Sunday.” “We think
her case is going nowhere.’’
The impasse between
the Senate leaders leaves
open the possibility of a pro-
tracted delay until the arti-
cles are delivered.
Trump has called the
holdup “unfair” and claimed
that Democrats were violat-
ing 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 pro-
cess in the Senate with more
witnesses.”
“If her case is so air-
tight ... why does she need
more witnesses to make her
case?’’ Short said.
White House officials
have also taken to highlight-
ing 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.
At one point, Trump had
demanded the testimony
of witnesses of his own,
like Democrats Joe Biden
and his son Hunter, and the
intelligence
community
whistleblower whose sum-
mer complaint sparked the
impeachment probe. But he
has since relented after con-
certed lobbying by McCon-
nell and other Senate Repub-
licans who pushed him to
accept the swift acquittal
from the Senate and not to
risk injecting uncertainty
into the process by calling
witnesses.
East Oregonian
A7
Evangelical tussling
over anti-Trump
editorial escalates
By ELANA SCHOR
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — As
the political clamor caused
by a top Christian magazine’s
call to remove President Don-
ald Trump from office contin-
ues to reverberate, more than
100 conservative evangelicals
closed ranks further around
Trump on Sunday.
In a letter to the president
of Christianity Today maga-
zine, the group of evangelicals
chided Editor-in-Chief Mark
Galli for penning an anti-
Trump editorial, published
Thursday, that they portrayed
as a dig at their characters as
well as the president’s.
“Your editorial offensively
questioned the spiritual integ-
rity and Christian witness of
tens-of-millions of believ-
ers who take seriously their
civic and moral obligations,”
the evangelicals wrote to the
magazine’s president, Timo-
thy Dalrymple.
The new offensive from
the group of prominent evan-
gelicals, including multiple
members of Trump’s evan-
gelical advisory board, sig-
nals a lingering awareness
by the president’s backers
that any meaningful crack
in his longtime support from
that segment of the Christian
community could prove per-
ilous for his reelection hopes.
Though no groundswell of
new anti-Trump sentiment
emerged among evangelicals
in the wake of Christianity
Today’s editorial, the presi-
dent fired off scathing tweets
Friday accusing the establish-
ment magazine – founded by
the late Rev. Billy Graham in
1956 — of becoming a cap-
tive of the left.
The letter to the maga-
zine’s president sent on Sun-
day also included a veiled
warning that Christianity
Today could lose readership
or advertising revenue as a
result of the editorial, which
cites Trump’s impeachment
last week.
Citing Galli’s past char-
acterization of himself as an
“elite” evangelical, the let-
ter’s authors told Dalrymple
that “it’s up to your publica-
tion to decide whether or not
your magazine intends to be
a voice of evangelicals like
those represented by the sig-
natories below, and it is up
to us and those Evangelicals
like us to decide if we should
subscribe to, advertise in and
read your publication online
and in print, but historically,
we have been your readers.”
Among the signato-
ries of the letter are George
Wood, chairman of the
World Assemblies of God
Fellowship; Rev. Tim Hill of
the Church of God; former
Arkansas governor and GOP
presidential hopeful Mike
Huckabee; and former Min-
nesota GOP Rep. Michele
Bachmann. Another signa-
tory, Rev. Samuel Rodri-
guez, serves on Christianity
Today’s board of directors
and has been an evangelical
adviser to Trump.
Galli told CBS’ “Face the
Nation” on Sunday that he
views the chances of Trump
leaving office, either through
a reelection loss or post-im-
peachment conviction by the
Senate, as “probably fairly
slim at this point.” The editor-
in-chief defended his editorial
as less of a “political judg-
ment” than a call for fellow
evangelicals to examine their
tolerance of Trump’s “moral
character” in exchange for his
embrace of conservative poli-
cies high on their agenda.
“We’re not looking for
saints. We do have private
sins, ongoing patterns of
behavior that reveal them-
selves in our private life that
we’re all trying to work on,”
Galli said Sunday. “But a
president has certain respon-
sibilities as a public figure
to display a certain level of
public character and public
morality.”