The crucial issue here isn’t that the Republicans voted not to hear any witnesses, it’s the fact that they held a vote on it.
Picture a formal trial: the jury votes on whether they want to hear witnesses. Just taking that vote is a blanket denial of the Senator’s oath “to be impartial jurors.” You can’t be an impartial juror and admit that you’ve already made up your mind – before the trial even starts. (The jury foreman, Leader Mitch McConnell, repeatedly said the result was a foregone conclusion long before deliberations began. Idiot.)
“Juror” and “voting on witnesses” are mutually exclusive. They’re legal opposites. Their juxtaposition violates every clause, paragraph, comma, and period in the entire Constitution of the United States.
To add insult to injury, the Republicans voted “no” on witnesses (a full admission that they agreed with all the charges), and then the accused declared their acquittal represented the total lack of proof. You can’t agree a defendant is guilty then turn around and say he’s not (resounding clapping from the Republicans in the East Room – at the National Prayer Breakfast too, no less. Roar – I am God). That’s legal nihilism, at a minimum, and conspiracy to violate their Constitutional oath “to be impartial jurors” at the other extreme.
Even the mafiosos of old had more honor than this “gang of fifty.” Much more honor. Infinitely more honor.
Be that as it may, the media has thoroughly and often made a case for witnesses. It’s the obvious case, and that’s exactly the strategy of the counsel of the defense, as a distraction from the very strong case to be made for obstruction of justice that never got legs in United States versus Donald R. Trump.
The Republican Senate caucus, with the exception of Senator Romney, voted not to have more witnesses. After that vote, after the Majority and Minority Leaders were haggling over the structure for the rest of the trial, Majority Leader McConnell communicated with the White House several time by cell phone (right there on the bottom of your TV screen) to see if the terms arranged with Senator Schumer, the minority leader, were okay with the President.
A jury foreman coordinating with the accused to see if the terms for the remainder of the tribunal were okay with the accused? (Impartial jurors? Blind justice?) Of course, Leader McConnell had said all along that he would coordinate with the White House every step of the way. However. It’s one thing to read the words and another altogether to actually see that coordination in real-time on live TV for all the world to see.
And the world was watching, I guarantee you: asking all the same questions as I am here – far, far more confused than any of us Americans were – because other nations aren’t as “sophisticated” as the United States to run a “political trial.” Why? Because nobody has held such a political trial since the Gestapo and the Nazis, or perhaps Stasi and the East German Soviets (the Ministry for State Security – how Orwellian is that?).
The consensus among all the Senators (pundits, commentators, etc.) was that Trump was desperately anxious to end the trial right then and there, on Friday afternoon, before the close of business. He had a giant audience for an interview with Hannity right before the Super Bowl on Sunday, a tradition that Fox News started by President Obama. Then he had the State of the Union address coming up on Tuesday evening. The President didn’t want either of those tarnished by a trial that was still in session. So, yes, you can be darned sure he cursed Leader McConnell until his ears were red, twisting McConnell’s arm (and leg, and everything else you can get a handle on) until it broke.
Leader McConnell is a proud man. Despite appearances, he runs his own show and does so with consummate skill. To be manipulated by the President in such a humiliating way, in public – must have been infuriating. Hence the text in the resolution that was finally approved by the majority Republican caucus that “the no witness vote was made in order to avoid lengthy deliberations over executive privilege.”
There was an extreme sense of urgency from the very beginning of the trial. Trump had his timetable, as stated above, and the Republican Senators themselves wanted the whole damn sordid mess over with to get their ugly mugs out of the media every day – on prime stupid time, no less. Every minute of face time, sweating bullets to defend an indefensible position, was a thousand independent votes lost in November and a dozen more embarrassing questions from the media, from donors, from advertisers. (Nobody cares about the voters.)
And you wonder why Speaker Pelosi delayed sending the impeachment charges over from the House for a few weeks? First, to let the naked truth set in and give witnesses a chance to speak up (they did, Bolton and Parnas among them). Second, to cram the defense up against the wall, forcing them into a rushed goal-line defense so that the president was free and clear by Super Bowl Sunday. He wasn’t. The trial went into overtime after the witness vote, and the video agony of the Republican Senators continued for five more terribly uncomfortable days. Exactly Speaker Pelosi’s objective, to sweat a compromise out of them. It worked. Senator Romney cracked, and the entire Democrat caucus held firm. The President couldn’t claim a bipartisan acquittal. Impeached for all time, and the first bipartisan presidential impeachment in the history of our great nation.
This time issue was brought up often and prominently by the defense. They tried to say that the House rushed through the proceedings last fall, but we all know that the US Constitution guarantees (in the 6th amendment) a speedy trial. It doesn’t say a speedy trial if you’re guilty. It doesn’t say a speedy trial if you’re innocent. It guarantees a speedy trial for everybody – for the accused, for the Senate, for the Chief Justice (who was still working his day job all this time), and for the American people.
The House managers never mentioned The Speedy Trial Clause to defend their rapid and efficient prosecution of the preliminary hearing last fall. Doing so would have voided all of the defense counsel’s diatribes that they moved so fast in order to muck up the campaign season and to “steal the vote from the American people.”
The Speedy Trial guarantee in the Constitution applies to all of the issues regarding witnesses. It ensures, per the oversight of the Chief Justice (who never mentioned it, either; very unprofessional), that all the anticipated haggling over witnesses and executive privilege and immunity would be resolved quickly. Contrary to Leader McConnell’s assertion, there would be no extended hassling over witness testimony. Not because they “worked out a deal or a witness swap,” nor because the Chief Justice would rule on admissibility and pertinence – but because the Constitution enforces the speedy trial requirement upon everybody.
What, now they’re going to vote if The Speedy Trial Clause applies? They didn’t have to. Because everybody in the Senate chamber, in refusing to mention it in the defense, the prosecution, the Q&A sessions, or in the Senator’s ten-minute depositions on Tuesday and Wednesday – they all conspired not to mention The Speedy Trial Clause, thereby voting to void it by virtue of omission.
In the Senate Record, the witness issue obscured – once again – a more important underlying issue. The two sides spent fully half of their allotted time arguing Constitutional issues, and neither bothered to cite The Speedy Trial Clause of the 6th amendment. Shame on them.
In “The Case of the Belligerent Bully” Perry Mason episode, the judge would have banged his wooden gavel and ordered the defense to get a move on because this, here is going to be a speedy trial, whether you want it or not. Delay any further, and you’ll be cited for – oops – contempt of justice.
But they did refuse to prosecute a speedy trial, all of the Republicans. They promised to delay things to the fullest extent of the law, all the way to the (stacked) Supreme Court. Leader McConnell and the entire Republican caucus signed off on these Fabian (delaying methods, used by the Carthaginian General Hannibal, who was threatening the gates of Rome) tactics.
If you can’t justify your contempt of justice by legal means, if your attempts to subvert the meaning of the Constitution fail; if all else fails, resort to political power – gang up all your constituency and declare yourselves in the right. In so doing, Leader McConnell made the entire Republican caucus into fact-witness counsels for the defense.
I’m sorry, but they might, in some contorted way, defend the no witness vote. Delaying the final act might even pass muster for a blind, deaf, and mute electorate. However, as “impartial judgment” jurors in an impeachment trial standing, to a man, at the table for the defense lawyers?
That’s more than conspiracy and racketeering – it’s outright treason.
Finally, the best evidence against a defendant is his own words. To quote Trump at the Davos meeting in January 2020, “We have all documents, and they aren’t getting them.” The unspoken promise in that brazen statement is that “We have all the witnesses and they aren’t gonna testify.”
Thus admitting (1) multiple counts of obstruction of Congress regarding documents subpoenaed by the House, (2) violation of the civil rights of 4 million executive department employees by prohibiting them from carrying out their civic duty to respond to subpoenas and testify before Congress, and (3) suborning jurors (Senate Republicans) by the implicit threat against them in this and many other far more obvious statements on Twitter, to the media, and otherwise in the public forum.
We now know, after the President’s retaliation against witnesses LTC Vindman (and his twin brother, also a LTC) and EU Ambassador Sondman, he really did say “I’ll have your head on a pike,” as alleged by Chairman Schiff, promising extreme retaliation against anybody who crosses him.
Who needs witnesses? We now have multiple criminal acts: intimidation of witnesses, suborning jurors, retaliation against witnesses, obstruction of justice, obstruction of Congress, and extreme abuse of power.
Trump should have taken the deal offered to him by the House managers because now he’s got multiple felonies to defend against, any one of which (and there are 4 million counts) could put him behind bars.