Trump Acquitted of Two Impeachment Charges in Near Party-Line Vote

As Republicans rallied behind President Trump, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, joined Democrats in voting to convict, the only senator to cross party lines.
By Nicholas Fandos

WASHINGTON — After five months of hearings, investigations and revelations about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, a divided United States Senate acquitted him on Wednesday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress to aid his own re-election, bringing an acrimonious impeachment trial to its expected end.

In a pair of votes whose outcome was never in doubt, the Senate fell well short of the two-thirds margin that would have been needed to remove the 45th president. The verdicts came down — after three weeks of debate — almost entirely along party lines, with every Democrat voting “guilty” on both charges and Republicans uniformly voting “not guilty” on the obstruction of Congress charge.

Only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with his party to judge Mr. Trump guilty of abuse of power.

It was the third impeachment trial of a president and the third acquittal in American history, and it ended the way it began: with Republicans and Democrats at odds. They disagreed over Mr. Trump’s conduct and his fitness for office, even as some members of his own party conceded the basic allegations that undergirded the charges, that he sought to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals.

But in a sign of the widening partisan divide testing the country and its institutions, the verdict did not promise finality, which members of both parties conceded would come only after the November election.

The president himself did not directly address his acquittal, but shortly afterward, he announced on Twitter that he would make a public statement on Thursday at the White House about what he called “our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax.” He then tweeted an attack ad against Mr. Romney that called the senator a “Democrat secret asset.”
At the Capitol earlier in the day, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who presided over the trial, put the question to senators shortly after 4 p.m.: “Senators how say you? Is the respondent, Donald John Trump, president of the United States guilty or not guilty?”

Seated at their mahogany desks, senators stood one by one to answer “guilty” or “not guilty” to each of the two articles of impeachment.

“It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is hereby, acquitted of the charges in said articles,” declared Chief Justice Roberts after the second article was defeated.

Democratic leaders immediately insisted the result was illegitimate, the product of a self-interested cover-up by Republicans, and promised to continue their investigations of Mr. Trump.

“The verdict of this kangaroo court will be meaningless,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said moments before the vote. “By refusing the facts — by refusing witnesses and documents — the Republican majority has placed a giant asterisk, the asterisk of a sham trial, next to the acquittal of President Trump, written in permanent ink.”

During a statement to his colleagues, Senator Mitt Romney said he would vote to convict President Trump of abuse of power, becoming the first Republican to break party ranks.
In the last several weeks I’ve received numerous calls and texts. Many demanded in their words that I stand with the team. I can assure you that thought has been very much on my mind. You see, I support a great deal of what the president has done. I’ve voted with him 80 percent of the time. But my promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and political biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me, for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong. So the verdict is ours to render under our Constitution. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfill our duty. The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor. Yes, he did.

“This decision has been made,” Mr. McConnell said curtly. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s in the rearview mirror.”

As expected, the tally in favor of conviction on each article fell far below the 67-vote threshold necessary for removal. The first charge was abuse of power, accusing Mr. Trump of a scheme to use the levers of government to coerce Ukraine to do his political bidding. It did not even garner a majority vote, failing 48 to 52, with Mr. Romney voting with the Democrats. The second article, charging Mr. Trump with obstruction of Congress for an across-the-board blockade of House subpoenas and oversight requests, failed 47 to 53, strictly on party lines.

Like this one, the trials of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton also ended in acquittal — a reflection of the Constitution’s high burden for removing a chief executive.

But in a stinging rebuke of the country’s leader aimed at history, Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said that Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was “the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.” Though he voted against the second article, Mr. Romney became emotional on the Senate floor in the hours before the verdict on Wednesday as he described why he deemed Mr. Trump guilty of abuse of power, calling it a matter of conscience. He was the first senator ever to vote to remove a president of his own party.

 
“I am sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters,” Mr. Romney said. “Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?”

Mr. Romney’s defection, which he announced a couple of hours before the final vote, was a stark reflection of the sweeping transformation of the Republican Party over the past eight years into one that is now dominated almost entirely by Mr. Trump. And it deprived the president of the monolithic Republican support he had eagerly anticipated.

Still, the White House declared victory.

“Today, the sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J. Trump,” said Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary. “As we have said all along, he is not guilty.”

Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign moved quickly to capitalize on the moment, distributing a fund-raising email declaring, “Sorry haters, I’m not going anywhere.”

Several Republican senators ultimately acknowledged the heart of the House case — that Mr. Trump undertook a concerted pressure campaign on Ukraine to secure politically beneficial investigations into his rivals, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., using nearly $400 million in military aid as leverage.

But most argued that the conduct was not sufficiently dangerous to warrant the Senate removing a president from office for the first time in history — and certainly not with an election so near. Others dismissed Democrats’ arguments altogether, insisting their case was merely an attempt to dress up hatred for Mr. Trump and his policies as a constitutional case.

Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, two Republican swing votes who have tilted against the president in the past, both voted against conviction and removal. And two Democrats from traditionally conservative-leaning states, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, voted to convict Mr. Trump, denying him the bipartisan acquittal he coveted.

Although the verdict was never in doubt, Democrats lobbied to expand the scope of the Senate trial to include witnesses and documents that the president refused to provide during the House inquiry, working to pressure vulnerable Republicans facing challenging re-election contests, like Ms. Collins, to join them or risk being portrayed as beholden to Mr. Trump. All but two Republicans refused, making the trial the first impeachment proceeding in American history to reach a verdict without calling witnesses.

As they closed their case, the seven Democratic House managers who prosecuted it warned that Mr. Trump would emerge only emboldened in his monarchical tendencies and that those who appeased him would be judged harshly by history. Republicans, they said, had chosen to leave the president’s future up to voters despite evidence that he had tried to cheat in the election, and would continue to do so.

Seldom used in American history, impeachment is the Constitution’s most extreme mechanism for checking a corrupt or out of control officeholder. In unsheathing it, Democrats took on political risk that could backfire in November on their presidential nominee or their incumbents in Congress, including moderates in conservative districts and states where Mr. Trump is popular.

At least one Democrat, Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, glancingly acknowledged that his vote to convict would most likely contribute to his loss this fall in deeply conservative Alabama.

“There will be so many who will simply look at what I am doing today and say it is a profile in courage,” Mr. Jones said before the vote. “It is not. It is simply a matter of right and wrong.”

For now, the impeachment of Mr. Trump appears to have evenly divided the nation. Public opinion polls suggest that even though a growing number of Americans agreed that the president most likely abused his office and acted improperly, more than a slight majority never agreed that he should be removed from office.

If Mr. Trump’s standing among the public has been hurt by the trial, it is not yet evident. To the contrary, the latest Gallup poll, released on Tuesday, showed that 49 percent of Americans approved of his job performance — the highest figure since he took office three years ago. The same survey showed that Republicans’ image has improved markedly, with 51 percent viewing them favorably compared with 43 percent in September.

The possibility of impeachment has hung over Mr. Trump’s presidency virtually since it began, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, initially resisted it. After Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russia’s election interference in 2016 and possible collaboration with the Trump campaign, found 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump, she said impeachment was too divisive a remedy to pursue.

Her calculations changed in September with the emergence of an anonymous C.I.A. whistle-blower that accused the president of marshaling the powers of government to press Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden and a theory that Democrats had colluded with Ukraine in the 2016 election. In authorizing the impeachment inquiry, Ms. Pelosi tasked the House Intelligence Committee to investigate the scheme and build a case.

Mr. Trump issued a blanket directive to all government agencies not to comply with the inquiry, robbing investigators of key witnesses and facts that could have filled out their case, and ultimately giving rise to the obstruction of Congress charge.

Still, more than a dozen administration officials came forward, offering testimony in private and then in scintillating public hearings that confirmed and expanded on the whistle-blower complaint. On Dec. 18, the House impeached Mr. Trump on both counts.

To protect his Senate majority as much as the presidency, Mr. McConnell promised a swift acquittal — and he delivered it. It was just 20 days from the time the articles of impeachment were first read on the Senate floor to Wednesday’s vote. By comparison, the Clinton trial in 1999 lasted five weeks, and in 1868, the Senate took the better part of three months to try Johnson.

The final shift in defenses by all but the most conservative of Mr. Trump’s allies came last week, when The New York Times reported the first in a series of articles revealing that in August, Mr. Trump told John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, that he would not release the military aid for Ukraine until the country helped out with investigations into Mr. Biden and other Democrats.

Impeachment was seriously contemplated for a president only once in the first two centuries of the American republic; it now has been so three times since the 1970s, and two of the past four presidents have been impeached.

www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/politics/trump-acquitted-impeachment.html