After a week of an intense trial, including many pictures, videos, interviews and audio recordings from the insurrection at the Capitol building Jan. 6, 2021, former President Donald J. Trump was acquitted Saturday, Feb. 13 in his second impeachment trial.
Only weeks after an attack on the Capitol building that took the lives of five individuals and injured over 100, a vote of 57 to 43 fell ten votes short of the two thirds majority that was needed to convict the former president and disqualify him from holding office in the future. Seven Republican Senators broke rank in this historic impeachment trial: Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania.
The Prosecution for this trial included Jamie Raskin as the lead impeachment manager and main author of the impeachment article, Representative David Cicilline and Representative Ted Lieu. Joaquin Castro, Eric Swalwell, Madeleine Dean and Stacey Plaskett also assisted by delivering oral arguments in favor of conviction.
Trump’s defense team was led by lawyer Michael van der Veen from Philadelphia as well as David Schoen and Bruce Castor.
Prior to the Senate impeachment trial, the House voted 232 to 197 to approve an article of impeachment which stated that Trump incited violence against the government while working to overturn the results of the election. In this vote, 10 Republicans broke rank and joined the Democrats in voting for impeachment.
Upon reaching the Senate, the first argument and subsequent vote that had to happen was whether or not a former president can be impeached. This would have set a dangerous precedent that if a president were to do something in the days before leaving office that would not offer enough time for a trial to happen, they would automatically not be able to get Congressional punishment from these actions. The motion filed by Senator Rand Paul was defeated in a 55-45 vote that saw five Republicans break party lines before the actual impeachment trial even happened. All five of these individuals ended up voting in favor of conviction in the official trial later as well.
Political science professor at Elizabethtown College and scholar Dr. Fletcher McClellan believes that the verdict in this case was not unexpected, as nobody really believed that 67 total Senators would vote in favor of conviction. For those wondering what the point of this Impeachment was, McClellan says, “precedent.” First of all, this trial put on the global stage how close insurrectionists actually got to some members of Congress. Videos from cell phones and security cameras taken from that day were able to help viewers imagine how close many were, including Romney, former Vice President Mike Pence and now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to harmful situations or even hostage situations.
It has been proven through this trial that the goal of some of these insurrectionists was to either cause harm to or take hostage certain members of Congress whose ideals were different from their own and were, in their minds, blocking who they believed won the presidency from continuing his position. McClellan mentioned Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Pence in particular as being some of the mob’s main targets.
“We know… not everybody was bent on violence but there were more than a few determined people who were hoping to catch a congressional leader or the Vice President,” McClellan noted in a description of the day.
The clear intent of these individuals was to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes. McClellan says that this in itself is a very serious situation and he believed that the House impeachment managers did a “fantastic job” at pulling together a convincing narrative about what happened Jan. 6.
“It really disturbs me that members of Congress that were just attacked and just came so close to being abducted could watch these videos and not think that Trump was responsible,” McClellan stated before hypothesizing about whether or not this would have happened were a different president be in office, and he believes no, it would not have.
