According to excerpts from a forthcoming book, Republican senators were more involved in orchestrating President Donald Trump's defense in his first impeachment trial.
In the upcoming book, "Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump", two writers give a behind-the-scenes look at the two failed attempts to remove the president.
The first attempt dealt with Trump's withholding of aid to Ukraine on the condition that the country's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. The Senate acquitted the president despite the House impeaching him for abusing power.
Even though he was caught on tape telling Zelenskyy to "do us a favor" by launching a probe of Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his defense team maintained he did nothing wrong.
A lawyer for Trump went so far as to argue before the entire Senate that Trump could have done whatever he wanted to get himself reelected if he believed that his own reelection would be in the public interest.
Republican senators who sat in the chamber for weeks as witnesses in the impeachment trial were alarmed by the outrageous line of defense.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told the Trump team to switch tactics.
There are zero senators who think there was no quid pro quo. There wasn't any Cruz said at one point that there wasn't a single one.
Lindsey Graham was angry at Trump's legal team after they fumbled their response to a senator's question. It was too late for Trump to do so, according to his attorneys.
We're fucked. We are not happy. After walking into the GOP cloakroom, a private chamber next to the Senate floor, Graham reportedly said that he was a Trump ally.
Republican senators told reporters that it would be inappropriate to comment on the substance of the proceedings because they were neutral as jurors. They took matters into their own hands because of the incompetence of Trump's legal team.
Their goal was to convince a small group of moderate GOP senators to vote against hearing testimony from witnesses like Trump's former national security adviser JohnBolt, who had claimed in a book that Trump specifically told him that he hid military aid from Ukraine in order to get an investigation into Biden and his The GOP conference was frightened by the book's release.
The outcome of the trial would split the caucus and cost it control of the Senate, but McConnell played a key role in convincing Murkowski and Alexander to vote against it.
This is not about this person. McConnell told his caucus that it was not about what he had been accused of doing. The date has always been November 3, 2020. The Senate is going to be flipped.
The Democratic groups launched attacks against Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. If she voted to allow witnesses, the motion would tie at 50%, forcing Roberts to break the tie and make a decision that would affect both sides of the case.
During the Q&A portion of the trial, Andrew Ferguson, McConnell's top legal counsel, dictated an answer to an important question posed by Republican senators and urged Trump's legal team to deliver it before the Senate. The answer conceded that Trump wasn't impeachable. The book tells a story.
The motion to hear witnesses was defeated in a 51-47 vote. Both Romney and Collins voted for witnesses.
According to the book, Murkowski struggled with her decision on witness testimony after publicly calling out McConnell over his pledge to act in "total coordination" with the Trump White House. Clinton had contact with Democratic senators during his 1999 impeachment trial. In an interview before the trial began, she said she was disturbed by McConnell's comments that jurors aren't impartial.
According to the book, McConnell sent an angry email after the interview.
The Alaska Republican compared her party to an animal native to her state in an interview with the book's authors.
The article was first published on HuffPost.
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