Days after the U.S. Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump of inciting insurrection, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Tuesday that Trump “has to be” criminally investigated over his role in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“It was so clear that he spent weeks, even months, preparing for this, getting everybody here and picking, of course, the date he did,” Leahy told VTDigger in an interview.
At a rally before the riots broke out, Leahy said, Trump had encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol and “applauded the incendiary words” of his lawyer, Rudolph Guiliani, who had called for “trial by combat.”
“He certainly had to know what was going on,” Leahy said of the former president.
The senator from Vermont said he agreed with a plan outlined Monday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to form a “9/11-type commission” to investigate the attack on the Capitol, but he said that any such commission must have subpoena power.
Leahy, the president pro tempore of the Senate, played a highly visible role at Trump’s impeachment trial. He agreed to preside over the proceeding after U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Vice President Kamala Harris declined to do so.
Leahy faced criticism from Trump’s legal team over his role.
In arguing that the trial was unconstitutional, ex-president’s lawyers argued Trump had a constitutional right to have the chief justice preside. They pointed out that Leahy had been an outspoken critic of Trump and had already “publicly announced his fixed view” that he should be convicted.
In response, Leahy pledged to hold a fair trial. He said Tuesday that he had since heard from both Democratic and Republican colleagues who told him he had been “extremely fair” in managing the proceedings.
“I voted based on the evidence, as did a number of Republicans who voted the same way,” Leahy said of his support for the former president’s conviction. “But I wanted to make sure that it was handled fairly.”
Ultimately, 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict Trump. Sixty-seven votes were needed to secure conviction. Vermont’s junior senator, Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., also voted to convict.
The trial came to a precipitous conclusion Saturday after House impeachment managers secured the votes to call witnesses to testify but ultimately opted against doing so. Some Democrats said summoning witnesses would not have altered the outcome of the trial but could have extended it for weeks.
Leahy defended the decision on Tuesday. He said that once both sides agreed to enter into the record a Republican member of Congress’ statement detailing Trump’s conduct during the riots, impeachment managers had “done everything they needed to.”
Leahy, the Senate’s longest-serving member, said House impeachment managers laid out their case “as well as I’ve ever seen anybody lay out a case on the Senate floor.”
“I was a prosecutor for eight years, and I know when the prosecution has a good case. In this case, they did,” said Leahy, a former Chittenden County state’s attorney.
“Many times when I was a prosecutor, if I had a good case, the other side, if they had no real defense, they would try to talk about anything but, usually with a lot of loud talk,” Leahy said. “And that is what I could see happening here.”
