Lawmakers signaled Sunday they believe congressional leaders will reach a deal that will prompt the House of Representatives to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate soon, amid a standoff over the rules and additional witnesses in President Trump’s trial.
“There will be an agreement and the trial will go forward,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democratic candidate for president, who called for witnesses the White House previously blocked to testify. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” she didn’t predict what such a deal would look like but said “I simply know that we have a constitutional duty to take on this very important case.”
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) said he sees the Senate starting its trial in January, arguing that further delays wouldn’t politically benefit Democrats. He said it wasn’t the Senate’s job to make the impeachment case against Mr. Trump but didn’t rule out more witnesses being called.
The Democratic-controlled House voted last week to impeach Mr. Trump on two articles related to his efforts to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that could benefit him politically. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) held off on sending the articles to the Republican-controlled Senate before the year-end break, saying she wanted more clarity on the rules for the trial.
Both houses of Congress are now on recess, and Mr. Trump is in Florida until the new year.
Mr. Trump has said he did nothing wrong, and Republicans have said impeachment is driven by Democrats’ animosity toward Mr. Trump. “It’s so unfair. She has no case,” the president said in a speech to activists in Florida Saturday night, referring to Mrs. Pelosi.
Democrats have said they want to call witnesses including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, former national security adviser John Bolton and Office of Management and Budget official Michael Duffey, in the belief they could shed more light on the Ukraine pressure campaign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said last week he didn’t plan to allow those witnesses, but Democrats have hoped to pick off some Republicans in the votes to formulate the trial’s rules.
Meanwhile, the White House has indicated it wants to call such witnesses as Hunter Biden, who served as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president. The elder Mr. Biden is a leading Democratic presidential contender, and Mr. Trump’s calling for an investigation of Hunter Biden was said by Democrats in their impeachment case to be an abuse of his office.
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