Congress headed toward a long standoff over the parameters of the Senate trial of President Trump as all sides dug in Monday, with Democrats demanding documents and witnesses while Republicans mocked the House’s delay in transmitting the impeachment articles across the Capitol.
Through media appearances, letters and tweets, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) chided House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), calling her decision to hold on to the impeachment articles “unfair” and “absurd,” respectively. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, accused White House officials of withholding “highly relevant” documents.
With Congress not slated to return to Washington until Jan. 6, senior officials prepared for a period of several weeks without any resolution.
“We’ll find out when we come back in session where we are,” McConnell told reporters in Louisville.
McConnell also referred Kentucky reporters to comments he made earlier Monday on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” accusing Pelosi of holding an “absurd position,” and said she seemed to be trying to tell his chamber how to run a trial.
Since Wednesday’s near-party-line House vote to impeach Trump, Pelosi has declined to formally send the two articles across the Capitol, the first necessary step to begin the trial.
Pelosi wrote in a tweet Monday that the House cannot move forward with choosing impeachment managers for the Senate trial “until we know what sort of trial the Senate will conduct.”
“President Trump blocked his own witnesses and documents from the House, and from the American people, on phony complaints about the House process,” Pelosi tweeted. “What is his excuse now?”
At the heart of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election……..read more
Source: Washington Post
