Trump later thrashed House Democrats, falsely asserting that they “would not give us lawyers, or not one witness” during the chamber’s impeachment inquiry, “but now demand that the Republican Senate produce the witnesses that the House never sought, or even asked for?”
Counter to Trump’s claims, the White House had refused to participate in the probe into the president’s conduct, and impeachment investigators did hear from three witnesses requested by Republicans.
Democratic lawmakers are now vying for additional witnesses in the Senate trial — including acting White House chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton — but it remains unclear whether they will attract sufficient GOP support to demand the testimony, which the White House has moved to block.
“They had their chance, but pretended to rush,” Trump wrote Thursday of House Democrats. “Most unfair & corrupt hearing in Congressional history!”
In another tweet, the president added: “No matter what you give to the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, it will never be enough!”
Trump also singled out for derision a favorite target, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, who is serving as the chief impeachment manager in the Senate and leading the Democrats’ case for the president’s prosecution.
Schiff and his fellow managers on Wednesday spent nine hours on the Senate floor laying out their opening argument in painstaking detail — deploying screenshots of deposition transcripts, emails, text messages and roughly 50 video clips to describe Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government to open investigations into political rivals including former Vice President Joe Biden.
The president disparaged their efforts on Thursday, tweeting that the presentation by the “Democrats & Shifty Schiff” was “loaded with lies and misrepresentations.”
He also criticized the managers for neglecting to mention episodes during President Barack Obama’s time in office when the former administration withheld U.S. financial aid from other countries.
Trump is accused of having made hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine, meant to combat Russian aggression, contingent upon President Volodymyr Zelensky’s announcement of Trump’s preferred political probes.
Despite the president’s outrage over the trial on social media, Hogan Gidley, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary, insisted on Thursday that Trump “has been very pleased with the way it’s going, for a myriad of reasons.”
“We’re looking forward to the chance when we get to lay out our case,” Gidley told reporters. “The attorneys are excited about that, and they’re going to attack it on that front and release that evidence and prove once and for all that this whole thing is illegitimate — that it’s a sham.”
Minutes after the Senate impeachment court convened Thursday afternoon, the president lashed out again, arguing that Democratic lawmakers feared the prospect of a deal that could secure testimony from Trump officials but allow Republicans to call witnesses such as Biden and his son, Hunter.
“The Democrats don’t want a Witness Trade because Shifty Schiff, the Biden’s, the fake Whistleblower(& his lawyer), the second Whistleblower (who vanished after I released the Transcripts), the so-called ‘informer’, & many other Democrat disasters, would be a BIG problem for them!,” Trump tweeted.
Source: politico.com
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