Top House impeachment managers ripped Mitch McConnell’s proposed rules for President Trump’s impeachment hearings Tuesday — accusing the Senate majority leader of orchestrating a cover-up of the commander-in-chief’s alleged misdeeds.
“Any intelligent person knows that in any trial, whether it is for robbing a bank or for subverting the Constitution of the United States, the accusers, in this case, the House of Representatives, bring in all the witnesses and all the evidence,” US Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.
“To be debating whether you should have the evidence admitted, to be debating whether you should allow witnesses, is to be debating whether you should have a cover-up by definition. There is no other way to look at it,” Nadler said during an appearance with US Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
“The only reason to oppose bringing a witness is to cover up because you’re afraid of what the witness will say. The question before the senate is, do the Republican senators want to be complicit in the cover-up of the president?”
Both Nadler and Schiff mocked McConnell’s decision to conduct hearings late into the night, asserting that the Kentucky Republican and staunch Trump ally doesn’t want people to watch the proceedings.
“Where as the [Bill] Clinton [impeachment] trial managers had six hours a day to present over a course of days, [Republicans are] now presenting that we double the amount of time each day so that the proceedings can conceivably go well in the night, when apparently Senator McConnell hopes the American people will not be watching,” Nadler charged.
Schiff ripped McConnell for creating the rules without consulting with Democrats in the Senate, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who also accused McConnell of trying to cover up the president’s actions.
“Sen. McConnell did not consult at all with Sen. Schumer on the contents of this text. I would assume Sen. Schumer only got to see it around the same time that we did in the House,” Schiff griped.
“And the reason this was kept hidden is that it does not prescribe a process for a fair trial. And the American people desperately want to believe that the Senate will give both the president and the House of Representatives a fair trial.”
McConnell, who has vowed to coordinate the televised trial with the White House, proposed on Monday rules that would execute a potentially quick trial without new testimony or evidence.
He unveiled a resolution that would give House Democratic prosecutors and Trump lawyers 24 hours on each side to present their arguments over four days.
Under the resolution, lawyers for Trump could move early in the proceedings to ask senators to dismiss all charges, a senior Republican leadership aide said, a motion that would likely fall short of the support needed to succeed.
Democrats issued statements earlier repeating their charges.
“A White House-driven and rigged process, with a truncated schedule designed to go late into the night and further conceal the President’s misconduct, is not what the American people expect or deserve,” Schiff wrote in a statement.
“The McConnell Resolution goes so far as to suggest it may not even allow the evidence gathered by the House to be admitted,” the statement continued. “That is not a fair trial. In fact, it is no trial at all.”
They also said McConnell failed to follow the model set during Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial in 1999.
“His resolution deviates sharply from the Clinton precedent — and common sense — in an effort to prevent the full truth of the President’s misconduct from coming to light,” the Democrats said in the statement. “In the Clinton case, the President provided all of the documents — more than 90,000 pages of them — before the trial took place. McConnell’s resolution rejects that basic necessity.”
Democrats would need four GOP senators to reach the 51-vote threshold needed to change the rules.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate.
With Wires