同情特朗普

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“I think it is appropriate at this point for me to admonish both the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body,” he said.

“One reason it has earned that title is because its members avoid speaking in a manner and using language that is not conducive to civil discourse … I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.”

“I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are” https://t.co/TVuArFZFGD pic.twitter.com/smOHfyqufd
— ABC News (@ABC) January 22, 2020
The dressing down came after Nadler asked the Senate to subpoena Trump’s ex-national security adviser John Bolton, who had a famous falling out with Trump which led to his White House exit.

Cipollone said Nadler “should be ashamed . . . for the way you addressed this body,” the Post reported. “It’s about time we bring this power trip in for a landing.”

Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, then chimed in, saying:

“Mr. Nadler, you owe an apology to the president of the United States and his family, you owe an apology to the Senate, but most of all, you owe an apology to the American people.”

Nadler, though, was undeterred, saying of Trump’s lawyers:

“They insist that the president has done nothing wrong, but they refuse to allow the evidence and hearing from the witnesses … and they lie, and lie and lie and lie.”

The interaction ended when Nadler threw down his papers in a huff.

Roberts, who had heard enough, stepped in.

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) walks with House managers as they arrive for the reconvening of the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 21, 2020. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Arguments

The Republican-controlled Senate will hear opening arguments in the trial on Wednesday, beginning up to six days of presentations on the question of whether Trump should be removed from office.

After Wednesday’s marathon session, senators voted 53-47 to approve a hastily revised set of procedures put forth by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that allows up to 48 hours of opening arguments – 24 hours for each side – over six days.

Trump was impeached last month by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden, a political rival, and impeding the inquiry into the matter.

The president denies any wrongdoing.

The Senate trial, the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history, will resume today at 1 p.m., the day after Democrats argued more witnesses and records were needed since the Trump administration had not complied with requests for documents and urged officials not to participate.

Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, who helped spearhead the House impeachment inquiry, said the evidence against Trump was “already overwhelming” but further witness testimony was necessary to show the full scope of the misconduct by the president and those around him.

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The sun rises on the U.S. Capitol as the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump continues in Washington, U.S., January 22, 2020. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Testimony

Republican senators have not ruled out the possibility of further testimony and evidence at some point after opening arguments and senators’ questions, but they held firm with Trump to block Democratic requests for witnesses and evidence.

During a debate that finally wrapped up near 2 a.m. on Wednesday, senators rejected on party lines, 53-47, four motions from Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to subpoena records and documents from the White House, the State Department, the Defence Department, and the Office of Management and Budget related to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

By the same tally, senators also rejected requests for subpoenas seeking the testimony of acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, White House aide Robert Blair and White House budget official Michael Duffey.

Under the rules, lawyers for Trump could move early in the proceedings to ask senators to dismiss all charges, according to a senior Republican leadership aide, a motion that would likely fall short of the support needed to succeed.

Even if such a motion fails, Trump is almost certain to be acquitted by the Republican-majority 100-member chamber, where a two-thirds majority is needed to remove him from office.

But the impact of the trial on his re-election bid in November is far from clear.

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In this file photo taken on December 18, 2019 U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at W. K. Kellogg Airport in Battle Creek, Michigan. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

The Senate trial is expected to continue six days a week, Monday through Saturday, until at least the end of January.

Trump and his legal team say there was no pressure and that the Democrats’ case is based on hearsay.

Cipollone described the Ukraine investigation as an illegal attempt to remove a democratically elected president and avert his re-election.

No president has ever been removed through impeachment, a mechanism the nation’s founders – worried about a monarch on American soil – devised to oust a president for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” One, Richard Nixon, resigned in the face of a looming impeachment.

 
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The rules that Senator McConnell & the Republicans rammed through the Senate tonight are designed to protect President Trump – not guarantee a fair & honest impeachment trial. The rules are rigged.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 22, 2020
It is not a new argument; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly accused the president of covering up his actions during last month’s impeachment investigation. But on Tuesday, it quickly become a refrain among House managers, Democratic senators, presidential candidates and the Democratic National Committee.

“I don’t know how they can deny all witnesses; let’s see what they do after a few days of this,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, another Democratic presidential candidate who was sitting in judgment, adding she detected guilty looks on the faces of some of her Republican counterparts.

“You can’t have a trial with zero witnesses and zero documents. That’s not how this works.”

The strategy may have been long in gestation, but it was helped by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate who handed Democrats red meat on Monday night by proposing impeachment trial rules that would have forced 24 hours of argument into just two days.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer walks during a break in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on January 21, 2020 in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Chuck Schumer, McConnell’s Democratic counterpart, cried foul, accusing the Republicans of an “egregious departure” from precedent.

“The McConnell rules seem to be designed by President Trump for President Trump,” Mr Schumer told the Senate just before the trial formally began. “It asks the Senate to rush through as fast as possible and makes getting evidence as hard as possible . . . In short, the McConnell resolution will result in a rushed trial with little evidence in the dark of the night — literally in the dark of night.”

Even some of the Republican moderates, particularly Maine’s Susan Collins, were squeamish about McConnell’s brazenness. A spokesperson for Ms Collins, who is up for re-election in November, acknowledged she had “raised concerns” about his attempt to cram 24 hours of debate into two days of Senate sessions.

McConnell beat a tactical retreat, scrawling a handwritten change into the rule proposal that would allow opening arguments by each side to stretch over three days instead, ostensibly ruling out impeachment proceedings that extended until 1 am.

But for the rest of the day, Republicans did not waver, with all 53 voting against amendments by Schumer to subpoena White House documents, state department documents and Office of Management and Budget documents.

The repeated rejections only emboldened Democratic efforts to portray their Republican colleagues as part of a Trump-backed strategy to withhold evidence from the American people.

“What we are seeing, and for hours now . . . (is) an effort to obstruct the Senate’s ability to actually know what happened,” said Senator Kamala Harris, late in the night.

 
突然发现,老毛当年搞运动时也是70来岁。闯王现在这个年龄,俺是不是发现了一个可得炸药奖的规律?:shale::evil:
老毛搞运动 是为中国的百年稳定着想的,老闯如何能比?老毛是个伟人,而老闯只会搞笑。
 
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This analysis was excerpted from the January 23 edition of CNN's Meanwhile in America, the daily email about US politics for global readers.

(CNN) Senate Republicans need to end this impeachment trial before President Donald Trump confesses to anything else.

"We're doing very well," Trump said, summing up the performance of his legal team after watching the trial from Davos, Switzerland. "But honestly, we have all the material. They don't have the material."

His timing was problematic, to say the least. Democrats had just spent a marathon Senate session trying to get Republicans to agree to force Trump to hand over potentially incriminating "material," including new witnesses and evidence.

The President's lawyers say he's got every right to withhold evidence pertinent to the case, because executive privilege covers sensitive presidential decisions. And who knows what "material" Trump really meant? But his tendency to blow the whistle on himself is one reason why the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, wants Trump acquitted as soon as possible.

The President's bursts of honesty have torpedoed his own interests before. After he fired FBI Chief James Comey, he told NBC that he did it because of the Russia investigation, opening himself to accusations of obstructing justice. Accused of asking Ukraine to probe Joe Biden, he went onto the White House lawn and asked China to do the same thing.

Last June, Trump foreshadowed his impeachment drama when he told ABC News that if a foreign government offered him dirt on a political opponent: "I think I'd like to hear it." And way back in the 2016 campaign, he chose a televised news conference as his platform to ask Russia, "if you're listening," to find Hillary Clinton's 30,000 missing emails. The same day, Russian hackers set out to do that.

Blurting out inconvenient truths is more than a verbal tic. It's a sign of obliviousness or disdain for codes of presidential restraint — which may be what got Trump into impeachment trouble in the first place.

The real test
Since US presidents get impeached on average every 77 years, you might think Americans would be buzzing over Trump's fate.

But what's on everyone's mind is a deadly viral outbreak that has spread from China to several countries, including one case in the US. The Wuhan coronavirus has so far killed 17 people and infected more than 500.

As the World Health Organization deliberates whether to call it an emergency of international concern, the world is already reacting. The US National Institutes of Health and other US scientists are working on a vaccine, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is watching closely.

A senior State Department official said Wednesday that there were encouraging signs that China was getting a handle on the situation, the same day that it shut down public transport in the eastern city of Wuhan, where the virus emerged. But memories of Beijing's slow response to the 2003 SARS epidemic have outsiders concerned.

Disease doesn't obey borders, which means any truly major health crisis will eventually land on a US President's desk. Barack Obama, for instance, took over crisis management when an Ebola outbreak in West Africa threatened to spread to the US in 2014.

Amid the panic of an epidemic, Donald Trump would need a steady hand, calming rhetoric, slick coordination among government departments and sensitive diplomacy with foreign capitals — qualities this White House is hardly known for, and at a time when Trump is already being driven to distraction.

 
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WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.

Multiple people described Mr. Bolton’s account of the Ukraine affair.

The book presents an outline of what Mr. Bolton might testify to if he is called as a witness in the Senate impeachment trial, the people said. The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.

Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.

For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.

Mr. Bolton also said that after the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call. A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.

And the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was present for at least one phone call where the president and Mr. Giuliani discussed the ambassador, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would always step away when the president spoke with his lawyer to protect their attorney-client privilege.

During a previously reported May 23 meeting where top advisers and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, briefed him about their trip to Kyiv for the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Trump railed about Ukraine trying to damage him and mentioned a conspiracy theory about a hacked Democratic server, according to Mr. Bolton.

The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton’s assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer blamed the White House for the disclosure of the book’s contents. “It is clear, regrettably, from the New York Times article published today that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript,” the lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, said Sunday night.

He said he provided a copy of the book to the White House on Dec. 30 — 12 days after Mr. Trump was impeached — to be reviewed for classified information, though, he said, Mr. Bolton believed it contained none.

The submission to the White House may have given Mr. Trump’s aides and lawyers direct insight into what Mr. Bolton would say if he were called to testify at Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. It also intensified concerns among some of his advisers that they needed to block Mr. Bolton from testifying, according to two people familiar with their concerns.

The White House has ordered Mr. Bolton and other key officials with firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump’s dealings not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Bolton said in a statement this month that he would testify if subpoenaed.

In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.

Mr. Trump told reporters last week that he did not want Mr. Bolton to testify and said that even if he simply spoke out publicly, he could damage national security.

“The problem with John is it’s a national security problem,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Davos, Switzerland. “He knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader and it’s not very positive?”

“It’s going to make the job very hard,” he added.

The Senate impeachment trial could end as early as Friday without witness testimony. Democrats in both the House and Senate have pressed for weeks to include any new witnesses and documents that did not surface during the House impeachment hearings to be fair, focusing on persuading the handful of Republican senators they would need to join them to succeed.

But a week into the trial, most lawmakers say the chances of 51 senators agreeing to call witnesses are dwindling, not growing.

Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said the Bolton manuscript underscored the need for him to testify, and the House impeachment managers demanded after this article was published that the Senate vote to call him. “There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the president’s defense,” they said in a statement.

Republicans, though, were mostly silent; a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, declined to comment.

Mr. Bolton would like to testify for several reasons, according to associates. He believes he has relevant information, and he has also expressed concern that if his account of the Ukraine affair emerges only after the trial, he will be accused of holding back to increase his book sales.

Mr. Bolton, 71, a fixture in conservative national security circles since his days in the Reagan administration, joined the White House in 2018 after several people recommended him to the president, including the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.

But Mr. Bolton and Mr. Trump soured on each other over several global crises, including Iranian aggression, Mr. Trump’s posture toward Russia and, ultimately, the Ukraine matter. Mr. Bolton was also often at odds with Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney throughout his time in the administration.

Key to Mr. Bolton’s account about Ukraine is an exchange during a meeting in August with the president after Mr. Trump returned from vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Bolton raised the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine for its war in the country’s east against Russian-backed separatists. Officials had frozen the aid, and a deadline was looming to begin sending it to Kyiv, Mr. Bolton noted.

He, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper had collectively pressed the president about releasing the aid nearly a dozen times in the preceding weeks after lower-level officials who worked on Ukraine issues began complaining about the holdup, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Trump had effectively rebuffed them, airing his longstanding grievances about Ukraine, which mixed legitimate efforts by some Ukrainians to back his Democratic 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with unsupported accusations and outright conspiracy theories about the country, a key American ally.

Mr. Giuliani had also spent months stoking the president’s paranoia about the American ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Marie L. Yovanovitch, claiming that she was openly anti-Trump and needed to be dismissed. Mr. Trump had ordered her removed as early as April 2018 during a private dinner with two Giuliani associates and others, a recording of the conversation made public on Saturday showed.

In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on the theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton’s question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.

The president often hits at multiple opponents in his harangues, and he frequently lumps together the law enforcement officials who conducted the Russia inquiry with Democrats and other perceived enemies, as he appeared to do in speaking to Mr. Bolton.

Mr. Bolton also described other key moments in the pressure campaign, including Mr. Pompeo’s private acknowledgment to him last spring that Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ms. Yovanovitch had no basis and that Mr. Giuliani may have wanted her removed because she might have been targeting his clients who had dealings in Ukraine as she sought to fight corruption.

Ms. Yovanovitch, a Canadian immigrant whose parents fled the Soviet Union and Nazis, was a well-regarded career diplomat who was known as a vigorous fighter against corruption in Ukraine. She was abruptly removed last year and told the president had lost trust in her, even though a boss assured her she had “done nothing wrong.”

Mr. Bolton also said he warned White House lawyers that Mr. Giuliani might have been leveraging his work with the president to help his private clients.
At the impeachment trial, Mr. Trump himself had hoped to have his defense call a range of people to testify who had nothing to do with his efforts related to Ukraine, including Hunter Biden, to frame the case around Democrats. But Mr. McConnell repeatedly told the president that witnesses could backfire, and the White House has followed his lead.

Mr. McConnell and other Republicans in the Senate, working in tandem with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, have spent weeks waging their own rhetorical battle to keep their colleagues within the party tent on the question of witnesses, with apparent success. Two of the four Republican senators publicly open to witness votes have sounded notes of skepticism in recent days about the wisdom of having the Senate compel testimony that the House did not get.

Since Mr. Bolton’s statement, White House advisers have floated the possibility that they could go to court to try to obtain a restraining order to stop him from speaking. Such an order would be unprecedented, but any attempt to secure it could succeed in tying up his testimony in legal limbo and scaring off Republican moderates wary of letting the trial drag on when its outcome appears clear.

 
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(CNN) America's latest "national nightmare" will not end when Republicans vote to acquit President Donald Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors, possibly as early as Friday.

A mere four months after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered an impeachment inquiry and six after Trump's now notorious "do us a favor" call with Ukraine's President, Trump will get on with his term as the third US President to be impeached by the House of Representatives and not removed by the Senate.

Given Trump's political temperament, and the impending battle between the parties for control of the White House, it seems unlikely there will be a healing voice to help reconcile a divided country -- such as President Gerald Ford's, when he declared that "our long national nightmare is over" in the wake of Watergate.

The President will skip free despite strong evidence to suggest that he abused a public trust by trying to coerce a foreign power -- with millions of dollars in taxpayer cash -- to play a role in a US presidential election. The many unresolved storylines and loose ends of this divisive episode will ensure that the political significance of his off-the-books diplomatic scheme in Kiev may only become more corrosive with time.

Thanks to the estranged political realities of the age, Trump is likely to interpret his latest escape, in a business and political career that has often flirted with disaster, as an inducement to broaden his crusade to expand his personal power and shake off remaining constitutional guard rails.

Still, the side effects of the showdown will reverberate for years and subsequent political eras. It will claim short-term victims — maybe even including the President or those who pursued him with elections only nine months away. But the dramatic events at the turn of 2019 and 2020 could also change how future generations understand presidential power and the process of purging its abuse by the use of impeachment itself.

Unknown consequences for November
Most immediately, the unsuccessful effort to oust Trump will help shape November's election that may partially be framed around whether Republicans pay a price for saving him or Democrats get a backlash for impeaching him.

Democrats hope that months focusing on apparent abuses of power by Trump will have soured crucial swing-state suburban voters irrevocably against him. But they'll worry they electrified Trump's base.

Republicans may prevent further damage to the President by preventing the calling of witnesses with potentially incriminating evidence such as former national security adviser John Bolton in a closely watched vote Friday. Some GOP members have told their leaders that they just want to get the trial over with -- since even its two weeks on the Senate floor have damaged their reelection prospects, CNN reported.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a retiring Tennessee Republican, all but assured no witnesses would be called during the trial when he announced late Thursday night that he would vote against a motion to call them. Alexander was seen as the most likely potential fourth Republican to vote in favor of hearing witnesses. His decision appears to end Democratic hopes of hearing from Bolton under oath despite a willingness from GOP Sens. Susan Collins and Mitt Romney to hear from witnesses.

With this in mind, it's possible Democrats benefit politically from the chance to lambast what happened in the Senate over the last two weeks as a mockery of a fair trial. Still, they would have loved to have had Bolton on the record to further color a dark picture of Trump's behavior.

Republicans will take a risk by blocking witnesses. They elected to perpetrate what Democrats will find easy to portray as a cover up by suppressing a chance to hear Bolton — a witness with information about the core accusation in the impeachment case — from telling his story.

"You cannot be acquitted if you don't have a trial, and you don't have a trial if you don't have witnesses and documentation," Pelosi said on Thursday, already excavating a seam of post-impeachment politics.

When the former national security adviser's information -- contained in the manuscript of a book first reported by the New York Times -- eventually comes out, GOP lawmakers must hope that it does not leave them badly exposed. As it is, history may remember the 2020 GOP as making a choice between power and political short-termism and shielding the Constitution and accepted codes of presidential behavior.

But in the absence of large numbers of GOP senators willing to fall on their swords in an altruistic rebuke of Trump's behavior, the dynamics of their party in the Trump era left them little choice.

The experience of impeachment will certainly tighten the bond between Trump and supporters who have just watched their champion once again defy the efforts of a Washington establishment to rein him in.

Trump's capacity to browbeat GOP senators into supporting him, even if some harbor doubts about his behavior reflects his greatest political success — the transformation of the Republican Party in his own fact-denying image.

Impeachment saga exposes national divide
The trial is a reminder of the gaping political disconnect down the middle of the nation. While Democrats and members of the Washington media and political establishments express horror at this presidency's slash and burn approach to the Constitution, many Trump supporters don't care.

Only 8% percent of Republican respondents believed Trump should be removed from office in a CNN poll conducted earlier this month, compared to 89% of Democrats.

Such figures are the payoff for Trump's relentless effort to reward his political base on issues like immigration, foreign policy and conservative judges, his clever use of cultural issues like gun control and abortion and his refusal to moderate the outsider, outlandish behavior that got him elected.

It is to those committed Trump voters to whom Republican senators must return every weekend. This is one reason why a senator like Cory Gardner from Colorado — endangered in a state trending away from Trump -- still cannot extricate himself from the President and his fervent base voters sufficiently to vote to hear new witnesses like Bolton.

In this context comments by Republicans that seem to jar with the facts and the weight of evidence in the trial can actually be explained.

"I think for most Americans they want us to move on to something that actually matters for them," one of Trump's top allies in the House, Republican Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, said on Thursday for example, perhaps thinking of the large majority of conservatives in his district.

The hyper-political nature of the aftermath of the impeachment fight shone through the Senate trial on Thursday when one of the President's attorneys took time out to praise the President's three years in office -- seemingly that his approval rating justified any extremes of behavior.

"We, the American people, are happier," said Eric Herschmann -- trying to put some flesh on the bones of a controversial case laid out by his colleague Alan Dershowitz that a President acting in the belief that his reelection in the nation's interest could not by definition carry out an impeachable act.

"And yet the House managers tell you that the President needs to be removed because he's an immediate threat to our country," Herschmann said.

Adopting Trump's campaign trail mantra, Herschmann touted a strong economy, the killing of terrorists and slowed border crossings.

"If all that is solely — solely, in their words — for his personal and political gain and not in the best interests of the American people, then I say, God bless him. Keep doing it," Herschmann said.

Constitutional shockwaves
Longer term, the end of Trump's trial will mark a profound political moment.

The President's defense team — beset by inconvenient facts about Trump's pressure on Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden and other Democrats — resorted to a staggeringly broad concept of presidential power for his actions.

That gave Republican senators a hook to argue that what Democrats charged as abuse of power and obstruction of Congress was in fact perfectly permissible behavior. But it lays down a blueprint for vastly enhanced inferred powers of the presidency for Trump and his successors.

It doesn't follow that all presidents will now seek to force vulnerable overseas powers to come up with political payoffs. But it could convince unscrupulous future occupants of the Oval Office to reason they might get away with it. Foreign adversaries keen to discredit US democracy could have a field day.

The implied expansion of presidential power that will be left in this impeachment saga's wake seems to be turning back the clock to before the time of Richard Nixon's ouster in the Watergate scandal. After that original "long, national nightmare" Congress sought to recover powers from White House that had been abused by the 37th President. But gradually, the presidency has adopted a more imperial mode starting with the Reagan administration through George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But none of those presidents -- who were sometimes criticized for overreaching executive authority on issues like union policy, anti-terrorism measures and immigration -- made the kind of audacious power grabs that have characterized Trump's administration and for which he has now been absolved.

Lead House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned on Thursday that the constraining of the presidency in the years after Watergate had now been reversed -- to dangerous effect.

"We are right back to where we were a half century ago," Schiff said. "And I would argue we may be in a worse place."

"That argument, if the President says that it can't be illegal, failed," he continued. "And Richard Nixon was forced to resign. But that argument may succeed here now. That means we're not back to where we are, we are worse off than where we are. That is the normalization of lawlessness."

 
Trump fires two impeachment witnesses

US President Donald Trump has dismissed two senior officials who testified against him at his impeachment trial.

The US envoy to the EU, Gordon Sondland, said he "was advised today that the president intends to recall me effective immediately".

Just hours earlier, Lt Col Alexander Vindman, a top expert on Ukraine, was escorted from the White House.
 
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