As the U.S. House of Representatives readies for the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry next week, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., criticized the Republican Senate majority leader for saying the upper chamber has already decided it would acquit President Donald Trump.
Earlier this week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that if the impeachment trial were held now, the Senate would acquit Trump.
“I will say I’m pretty sure how it’s likely to end,” McConnell told Politico. “If it were today, I don’t think there’s any question — it would not lead to a removal.”
In a recent interview with VTDigger, Leahy criticized McConnell’s remarks.
“That’s beneath the U.S. Senate,” Leahy said. “Sen. McConnell has his opinion, but he’s going to be a juror.”
“I would hate to think, when I was a prosecutor, that I was going to have people stand up before the trial and say ‘I’ve already made up my mind,’” he said.
The Senate is in the midst of trying to establish its rules for the impeachment trial which will end with the upper chamber deciding if Trump should be removed from office or not. Leahy has met with McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to ask for a “senators-only” meeting for both Republicans and Democrats to agree how the process should play out, Politico reported.
“I’ve been on four impeachment trials,” Leahy said. “Most people took it very seriously.”
The back-and-forth between senators comes as House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., announced William Taylor, top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, will give testimony in open hearings on Wednesday while Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, is scheduled to testify publicly on Friday.
George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Eastern Europe, is also scheduled to testify in an open hearing on Wednesday.
For weeks behind closed doors, the House Intelligence Committee has been investigating the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which the U.S. president asked Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden who served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company in Ukraine from 2014 to 2019.
Behind closed doors in September, Taylor told House lawmakers that Trump had decided not to give nearly $400 million in military aid or grant a meeting in the White House with Zelensky, unless Ukraine opened investigations into Hunter Biden and alleged Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
Taylor also called the testimony of Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the Europe Union, into question and led Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who sits on the intelligence and government oversight committee, to speculate that Sondland might have perjured himself.
On Tuesday, Schiff released transcripts of testimony from Sondland and Kurt Volker, a top U.S. diplomat, that included additional information from the ambassador to the European Union.
Sondland’s updated account of what led to the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, included details on his role in talking with the Ukrainians about beginning the investigation into the Bidens and that it was his understanding the White House would not release the military aid until Zelensky took action.
Many Trump administration officials have refused to show up for private hearings, which continued this week even as the lower chamber was on break. John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, refused to attend an intelligence committee hearing Thursday, threatening to file a lawsuit if he were subpoenaed.
