The House voted on Wednesday to send the impeachment articles against President Donald Trump to the Senate, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the seven House Democrats who will serve as the “managers” in the trial, which is set to start next week.
What We Know:
The measure passed 228-193, with one Democrat opposing the resolution — Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who also voted last month against both articles of impeachment.
The two articles, charging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, will be hand-delivered to the Senate later Wednesday; the trial is expected to begin on Tuesday. It remains undecided if witnesses will be called to testify.
The Process
The House managers who will prosecute the case against the president in the Senate are: Reps. Adam Schiff of California, who will be the lead manager; Jerry Nadler of New York; Hakeem Jeffries of New York; Jason Crow of Colorado; Zoe Lofgren of California; Val Demings of Florida; and Sylvia Garcia of Texas.
The managers have varied biographies: Schiff was a federal prosecutor; Demings was a police chief; several are attorneys; and Lofgren was a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment and a House member during the Clinton impeachment.
“This is about the Constitution of the United States, and it’s important for the president to know and Putin to know that American voters — voters in America — should decide who our president is,” Pelosi said, referring to the Russian president at a press conference with the managers.
Nadler said on the floor ahead of the resolution vote that Pelosi had “led our fight for a fair trial in the Senate.”
“Above all, a fair trial must include additional documents and relevant witnesses,” he said. “The American people have common sense. They know that any trial that does not allow witnesses is not a trial. It is a cover-up.
During Pelosi’s news conference, Trump called the impeachment a “Con Job” in a tweet and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., spoke on the Senate floor.
Trump told GOP lawmakers who attended the signing of his trade deal with China, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader, that he’d understand if they had to leave for the vote on the impeachment resolution. “They have a hoax going on over there, so let’s take care of it,” Trump said.
“It undoes the people’s decision in a national election,” McConnell said. “Going about it in this subjective, unfair and rushed way is corrosive to our institutions. It hurts national unity, and it virtually guarantees — guarantees — that future Houses of either party will feel free, free to impeach any future president because they don’t like him.”
Pelosi also reiterated her call for witness testimony at the trial.
“Time has been our friend in all of this, because it has yielded incriminating evidence, more truth into the public domain,” Pelosi said.
Earlier, she spoke about newly released documents linking Trump directly to his attorney Rudy Giuliani’s political digging in Ukraine, saying they highlighted the need for witness testimony at the impeachment trial.
“There can be no full & fair trial in the Senate if Leader McConnell blocks the Senate from hearing witnesses and obtaining documents President Trump is covering up,” Pelosi said in one tweet.
“The President has fought tooth-and-nail to keep thousands of documents away from the public,” the speaker said in another tweet. “And no wonder — each time new pieces come out, they show President Trump right at the center of the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.”
But the documents, which were released on Tuesday by House Democrats, appear to bolster House Democrats’ claim that Trump was more than aware of Giuliani’s efforts to find dirt in Ukraine on political rival Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.
Managers who spoke during the press conference emphasized that if Republicans block the testimony of witnesses or documents, then they are engaging in a cover-up.
“If the Senate doesn’t permit the introduction of all relevant witnesses and of all documents that the House wants to introduce because the House is the prosecutor here, then the Senate is engaging in an unconstitutional and disgusting cover-up,” said Nadler. “The question is: Does the Senate conduct a trial according to the Constitution, to vindicate the republic, or does the Senate participate in the president’s crimes by covering them up?”
House Democrats are expected to vote on sending the articles of impeachment from the House to the Senate, where Trump will be tried. Pelosi held the articles in the House for weeks, seeking to negotiate an agreement for witness testimony in the Senate. McConnell rebuffed her efforts to negotiate a deal, and the nation’s third presidential impeachment trial in American history is set to begin next week.
The decision to delay the transmission of the articles to the Senate, Schiff said, was “very effective” in bringing new evidence to light and forcing senators to go on the record regarding whether they want a fair trial.
McCarthy, however, said on the House floor Wednesday that Pelosi had held the articles “hostage in a failed play to gain leverage that she did not, and would never, have in terms of concessions. She got nothing, no control, no moral victories. In other words, another failed strategy.”
The president complained this week that he didn’t receive a fair “trial” in the House of Representatives. Impeachment trials are only held in the Senate, however, while the House is charged with investigating and deciding whether a trial should occur.
A senior administration official said Wednesday that it would be “extraordinarily unlikely” for the trial to go beyond two weeks, arguing that the articles of impeachment were so thin it won’t take long for the president’s team to mount a defense.
The official also said the Senate was not expected to hear from witnesses, but if it does, the president’s side would expect to be able to call their own.
The official declined to comment on whether Trump would assert executive privilege to block former national security adviser John Bolton from testifying if subpoenaed at the urging of Democrats, but said it would be an “extraordinary matter” to have someone in that position publicly discuss private conversations about national security matters with the president.
This is a Breaking News Story and will be updated here.
NBC News contributed to this report.
