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The verdict is unlikely to be the last word for former President Donald J. Trump, his poorly divided party or the purulent wounds of the January 6 insurrection that sparked the political trial left behind.
By Nicholas Fandos
WASHINGTON – A Senate still hit by the maximum violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries acquitted former President Donald J on Saturday. Trump in his political trial at the time, when all Republicans took their arms to dismiss a case he promoted last Saturday. 6 Unscathed at a last moment to cling to power.
Under the watchful eye of National Guard troops still patrolling the historic building, a bipartisan majority voted, stating that Trump was to blame for the House’s “incitement to insurrection” rate. Among them were seven Republicans, more members of a presidential party than they ever achieved. an unfavorable verdict in a political trial.
But with Trump’s party’s maximum merging around him, the 57-43 count fell 10 votes less than the two-thirds majority needed to convict and allow the Senate to act to disqualify him from his long-term work.
Among the Republicans who broke ranks to convict the guy he led for four tumultuous years, defrauding absolute loyalty were Senators 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 J. Toomey of Pennsylvania.
The verdict brought a brutal end to the fourth presidential political trial in U. S. history, and the only one in which the defendant left the workplace before being tried, but this is unlikely to be the last word for Trump, his poorly divided party, or the vast criminal and Congressional investigations into the assault.
He left purulent wounds in Washington and the country after an unprecedented 39-day era in the country’s history, adding a fatal insurrection in the Capitol, the political trial of one president, the inauguration of another, and a brief but green trial of envy in the Senate.
It only took five days to succeed in a verdict, in part because Democrats and Republicans were united in their preference for extended procedures and partly because Trump had left it transparent even before it began that they were not ready to hold him accountable. Most of the senators’ jurors had witnessed the occasions that led to the prosecution, having fled for their lives, with the vice president, as the crowd closed last month as they piled up to formalize President Biden’s victory.
Party leaders and even the president’s top unwavering supporters in the Senate have not defended his movements: a month-long campaign, plagued by electoral lies, to reverse his decisive defeat to Biden, which peaked when Trump told thousands of his supporters of Instead, in the face of a meticulous case brought by nine House prosecutors , found refuge in the technical arguments that the trial itself is invalid because Trump is no longer in office.
But his primary political calculation is clear. After party leaders briefly had fun using the procedure to purge Trump from their ranks, Republicans doubled the bet made five years ago: it’s better not to provoke another open confrontation with a guy that millions of his constituents still embrace singularly.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican and minority leader, incarnating the tortured balancing act, denouncing Trump, minutes after voting to acquit him, for an “shameful breach of duty. “In astonishing statements from the Senate attorney’s office, McConnell, who had brazenly thought about voting to convict Trump, in fact, argued that he was to blame for the charges, while claiming that the Senate could do nothing about it.
“There is no doubt, none, that President Trump is almost and morally guilty of causing the day’s events,” Mr. McConnell said. “The leader of the loose world can’t spend weeks saying that dark forces are stealing our country and then pretending to be amazed when other people do it and do reckless things.
But McConnell, who refused to call the Senate in consultation to conduct the trial while Trump was still in office, argued that he may not be convicted once he is no longer. McConnell said the only way to punish him now through the corrupt judicial system. Trump said, “he hasn’t gotten anything yet. “
Minutes after the verdict, Trump, excluded from Twitter, broke a rare silence he had maintained during the trial with a provocateur released from his post-presidential home in Florida, calling the process “another phase of Florida’s biggest witch hunt. Florida. ” The history of our country.
He did not regret his movements and firmly stated that he planned to remain a force in politics for a long time.
“In the coming months, I have a lot to express with you, and I look forward to continuing our combined adventure to achieve American greatness for all of our people,” Trump said.
The “not guilty” verdict set him free to run again, but it was unclear whether he could recover after fitting in to the first president to seriously threaten the nonviolent movement of power. Public polls recommend that Republicans have withdrawn their position en masse since the occasion of last month, however, an acquittal will most likely serve to give trump’s party activist base and further stoke the party’s huge divisions.
Democrats, for their part, condemned the verdict, but with the intention of temporarily focusing Washington’s attention on the new president’s ambitious legislative calendar and the coronavirus pandemic that is taking a bleak new step every day. The result promised to leave Biden, who took office, with the promise of “ending this ungodly war,” with the monumental task of taking the country beyond one of its most violent and turbulent chapters since the 19th century.
Last Saturday night, Biden declared the challenges, saying, “This unhappy bankruptcy in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile. “But in a sharp criticism of his predecessor, he also quoted McConnell about Trump.
Other prominent Democrats have turned their anger toward their Republican counterparts. President Nancy Pelosi temporarily rejected the concept of a bipartisan censorship resolution, saying she would let “cowardly senators” get away with it and be “a slap in the Constitution. “
“Five years ago, Republican senators lamented what might happen to their party if Donald Trump had become his presidential candidate and standard-bearer,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat for New York and majority leader, moments after the vote. “Look what happened. Look what Republicans were forced to stand for. Look what Republicans have chosen to forgive.
In a Capitol still surrounded by fences and barbed wire, the president, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont asked the senators a while before four o’clock in the afternoon: “Senators, what do you say?Is the respondent, Donald John Trump, to blame or not?Blame?”
Sitting in mahogany offices stained a few weeks earlier by insurgents as devices they can use to prevent Biden, senators dressed in a mask to protect themselves against the spread of coronavirus, have presented themselves in alphabetical order to vote.
“It was ordered and attempted to be said by Donald John Trump, and he is here to be acquitted of the rate in that article,” Trump told Leahy.
The vote came hours after the trial briefly dissolved into chaos when House prosecutors asked and then defected a wonderful request from witnesses who could reveal what the former president was doing while the attack was unfolding. Instead, any of the legal groups agreed to admit it as evidence. a letter from a Republican congresswoman who said he was told that the former president was in position through the crowd when the troublemakers attacked the Capitol.
Acquired the result in advance, the judgment itself an enlightening and cathartic act for history, clarifying the extent of the violence that occurred.
This could have been nothing more than Trump’s first trial a year ago. Second, the House attempted to defend an esoteric plot to pressure Ukraine to transmit Biden, and largely failed on the party lines.
But for five days this week, House administrators presented in heartbreaking main points the account of a horror that had spread in plain sight and which, using graphic videos and complex visual aids, showed more evidently than ever how the armed crowd had arrived. to a damaging one with Vice President Mike Pence and members of the House and Senate.
All this, prosecutors argued, was the paintings of Trump, who spread lies that the election had been “stolen,” has cultivated outrage among his supporters, encouraged violence, tried to pressure state election officials to democratically overthrow made a decision results. and despite all that was accumulated and unleashed by a crowd of his supporters – who had brazenly planned one last bloody war – to “stop the escape. “With no sign that he was sorry, they warned that it could cause a repeat if he was allowed to run again.
“If it’s not a cause for conviction, if it’s not a felony and a misdemeanor against the Republic and the United States of America, then nothing is,” said Deputy Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and senior director of his case. “President Trump will have to be condemned for the safety and democracy of our people. “
After stumbling last week with curved presentations, Trump delivered a very combative and incredibly brief defense to the president on Friday, calling the House’s indictment an “absurd and monstrous lie,” insisted for only 3 hours that the former president was a loving leader of the “law and order” who never sought out his followers to take the words “fight like hell” to the letter , and you may not have foreseen the violence that followed.
“They weren’t looking for a deal,” T. Van der Veen, a member of the assembled lawyers’ team, said of Democrats in their own final statements. “They told a political story, a fable and a fable in addition. “
They also put forward more technical arguments aimed at giving Republicans a haven for acquittal, arguing that it was uns constitutional for the Senate to review a former president and that the election of the president is a lie. noted as an incentive because the First Amendment protected his right to speak freely.
The seven Republicans who rejected these arguments in favor of condemnation were an ideologically varied organization in the stages of their political careers. Burr and Mr. Toomey plan to retire next year. Cassidy, Collins and Sasse have just been re-elected, and Romney and Murkowski are among Trump’s top persistent Republican critics.
They seemed to draw their strength from others. Shortly before the vote, Cassidy gave Mr. Burr. Il said, “I’m a yes,” he later said. Burr made a nod to him.
Murkowski, who will probably be re-elected next year in a state that Mr Murkowski is in danger of re-election. Trump won twice, then said he wouldn’t let his vote “be devalued by the fact that I think it’s useful or not for my political ambitions. “
“It’s not about me, ” he told reporters. ” This is actually what we stand for, and if I can’t say what I believe, what our president deserves to stand for, then why do they deserve to ask the people of Alaska?
After the attack and loss of the Senate through Republicans, there was a brief window in which it was thought that the outcome might be different. McConnell privately told advisers that a conviction for political trial might be the party’s only way to serve Trump after four tumultuous years, and his openness to convict him hinted at the option of a coalition of Republicans remaining in his leadership.
But over the time the proceedings began, while Biden was already in power, the party’s base in Congress had made it clear that Trump still had too much influence among his electorate to have interaction in a head-on struggle. threatened to back the main warring parties of House Republicans who had voted to accuse him, state parties across the country covered up votes to censor them or ask for their resignations.
Emily Cochrane, Luke Broadwater and Jonathan Martin contributed to the report.
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