On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the impeachment process against Donald Trump as a political proceeding instead of a judicial one.
“I’m not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There’s not anything judicial about it,” McConnell told the media. “The House made a partisan political decision to impeach. I would anticipate we will have a largely partisan outcome in the Senate. I’m not impartial about this at all.”
On Tuesday, Donald Trump penned a savage letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the letter, which read a lot like a series of Trump’s tweets, he compared the impeachment proceedings to “subverting America’s Democracy.”
McConnell’s latest comments came on the heels of House majority leader rejecting Democrats’ request to call witnesses for Trump’s Senate trial. It was Democrat’s goal to establish rules for both evidence and witnesses before a possible January Senate trial.
McConnell stated on Tuesday, while on the House floor, that it wasn’t the Senate’s job to build a case against Donald Trump.
“The House chose this road,” McConnell said. “It is their duty to investigate. It is their duty to meet the very high bar for undoing a national election.”
McConnell’s statement was a direct response to a letter written on Sunday by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
In his letter, Schumer asked McConnell to agree to a set of rules that are very similar to those that were used to govern the 1999 impeachment trial of then-President Bill Clinton.
During the Senate trial, Democrats want to call four administration officials, which includes Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
Schumer would later share that they chose the list to gather further information from individuals who have not testified in the impeachment proceedings.
“These four witnesses have direct knowledge of why the aid to Ukraine was delayed,” Schumer wrote in his letter. “We’re not interested in dilatory tactics. We’re not interested in introducing our own conspiracy theories. Just the facts, ma’am. And that’s what these four witnesses will produce.”
McConnell completely rejected Schumer’s letter. He made it clear that he wanted to meet with the minority leader directly to resume talks on how the structure of the trial should go,
“If this [impeachment trial] ends up here in the Senate, we certainly do not need ‘jurors’ to start brainstorming witness lists for the prosecution and demanding to lock them in before we’ve even heard opening arguments,” McConnell said. “I look forward to meeting with the Democratic leader very soon and getting our important conversation back on the right foot.”
While speaking with reporters on Tuesday, McConnell also stated that he was “optimistic” that he and Schumer could come to an agreement about the first phase of the Senate trial. However, when it came to the second phase, McConnell said that the two sides will “have to disagree.”
