The White House has hit back at lawmakers after President Donald Trump was impeached, slamming the “illegitimate articles of impeachment” and voicing confidence the president would be acquitted in the Senate.
“Democrats have chosen to proceed on this partisan basis in spite of the fact that the President did absolutely nothing wrong,” spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement, calling the votes in the House of Representatives an “unconstitutional travesty”.
Grisham said that there were no fact witnesses in the hearing and alleged bias by the Democrats.
“The President is confident the Senate will restore regular order, fairness, and due process, all of which were ignored in the House proceedings.
”He is prepared for the next steps and confident that he will be fully exonerated,” the statement said, referring to the upcoming trial in the upper chamber.
However, Trump was impeached for abuse of power in a historic vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, setting up a Senate trial on removing him from office after three turbulent years.
By a 230 to 197 vote in the Democratic-majority House, the 45th US president became just the third occupant of the White House in American history to be impeached.
Democrats said they had “no choice” but to formally charge the 73-year-old Republican, whose impeachment along stark party lines places an indelible stain on his record while driving a spike ever deeper into the US political divide.
“What is at risk here is the very idea of America,” said Adam Schiff, the lawmaker who led the impeachment inquiry, ahead of the vote.
Trump will now stand trial in the Senate, where his Republicans hold a solid majority and are expected to exonerate him.
The House vote came four months after a whistleblower blew open the scandal of Trump pressuring Ukraine’s president to investigate his potential White House challenger in 2020, the veteran Democrat Joe Biden.
After a marathon 10-hour debate, lawmakers also voted 229-198 to approve the second article of impeachment facing Trump — for obstructing the congressional probe into his Ukraine dealings.
Trump spent the first part of the day holed up at the White House, tweeting in frustration, but on Wednesday night the president was on the friendlier territory.
In an extraordinary split-screen moment, as the House was casting votes to impeach him, thousands of Trump’s most fervent supporters were cheering him at a rally in Michigan where he railed against a “radical left” he said was “consumed with hatred.”
“The Democrats are declaring their deep hatred and disdain for the American voter,” Trump said to boos and cheers.
“They’ve been trying to impeach me from day one. They’ve been trying to impeach me from before I ran,” he said.
“Four more years, four more years,” the crowd chanted back.
Despite testimony from 17 officials that Trump leveraged his office for political gain, the president maintained his innocence throughout the impeachment inquiry — denouncing it as an “attempted coup” and an “assault on America.”
– Battle opens over Senate trial –
Both sides were already gearing up for a battle over the Senate trial, where Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has the upper hand in setting rules and has already said he will coordinate with Trump’s team in doing so.
That could lead to a trial as short as two weeks, which by acquitting the president could turn impeachment into a political win in the run-up to the November 2020 election.
Democrats declared after Wednesday’s vote that McConnell needs testimony from four current and former White House aides with direct knowledge of Trump’s Ukraine dealings — and who he blocked from testifying in the House.
“The question is now whether Senator McConnell will allow a fair trial in the Senate, whether the majority leader will allow a trial that involves witnesses and testimony and documents,” said Schiff.
Pelosi hinted that the House leaders could hold off sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate to pressure McConnell on the witness issue.
“So far, we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” she told reporters. “We’ll decide what that dynamic is.”
“But right now, the president is impeached.”
Before Trump, Andrew Johnson, an outspoken white supremacist but strong anti-secessionist, was the first in the American history to suffer impeachment. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 unexpectedly elevated him as the vice-president to the White House. With the aftershocks of the civil war manifesting in bloody voter suppression and racially motivated terrorism across the South, Johnson’s presidency was immediately thrown into tumult by demands that the new president take steps to cement the war’s promise of racial equality. But Johnson vetoed civil rights legislation, unilaterally pardoned hundreds of former Confederate leaders and called for the murder of his political enemies.
Johnson was in essence impeached for undermining the cause of racial equality, the historian Brenda Wineapple wrote in her book The Impeachers.
Johnson remained in office after being acquitted in the Senate by one vote – a bribed victory, historians have speculated.
Richard Nixon who won re-election by what was then the largest margin of victory in the history of US presidential elections in November 1972, was the second to suffer impeachment. Five months earlier, a burglary at Democratic offices in the Watergate hotel complex had set in motion a chain of events that would end his presidency.
In his investigation of the burglaries, special prosecutor Archibald Cox uncovered a dirty campaign to attack Nixon’s political opponents, financed by a secret slush fund and directed by Nixon himself. For months, Nixon publicly denied all involvement.
But an impeachment inquiry was opened in October 1973, after Nixon fired the top two officials in the justice department for their refusal to fire Cox. A fight over evidence ensued, including tapes of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations.
In late July 1974, a third of elected Republicans on the House judiciary committee joined Democrats to approve three articles of impeachment, for obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress. The release of a “smoking gun” tape a week later, fixing Nixon at the center of the conspiracy, sealed the president’s fate.
Under pressure from fellow Republicans, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.
Bill Clinton whose impeachment is linked in popular memory to his relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, was the third. He was impeached for lying to a grand jury in a separate case, brought by a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones.
In response to a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Jones, Clinton denied in a sworn deposition and a later video interview that he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. That assertion was contradicted by a report submitted to Congress by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who documented Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky in lurid detail.
Impeachment proceedings against Clinton were opened in October 1998, and the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against him, for perjury and obstruction of justice, in December. Two other proposed articles – for abuse of power and perjury a second time – were voted down.
The Republican-led Senate – stronger than today’s, with a 55-seat majority at the time – acquitted Clinton easily on both counts, with the closer case drawing only 50 votes out of 67 needed.
Near-miss: Richard Nixon (1974)
(AFP)
