Senate warned of ‘indefinite’ delay as impeachment trial begins

Senators are warned that any move to call White House witnesses could delay Donald Trump’s trial ‘indefinitely’ | WATCH LIVE

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell walks out of the Senate Chamber before the start of Donald Trump's impeachment trial. Picture: Getty Images.

US Senators were warned that any move to call White House witnesses could delay the trial of President Trump “indefinitely” as the impeachment case got under way on Wednesday (AEDT) amid recriminations over the rules.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, piled pressure on the few Republican senators sympathetic to the idea of calling witnesses by raising the spectre of a “protracted and complex legal fight” in the courts. Accused by the Democrats of setting out a schedule “designed by President Trump for President Trump”, he did make one notable concession when he accepted that the 24 hours in total allowed for the prosecution and defence cases could be spread over three days instead of the two he had proposed.

Mr Trump was not even in the country for the start of his trial for “high crimes and misdemeanours": he was in Davos, talking up the US economy at the World Economic Forum before retiring to his hotel in the evening to catch up on events in Washington. He is accused of abusing his office and seeking to obstruct Congress from investigating a scheme to coerce Ukraine into helping with his re-election campaign.

Mr McConnell, 77, a senator from Kentucky who has become one of the president’s closest allies through his stewardship of the upper chamber, laid out a plan to hear both sides of the case against Mr Trump and senators’ questions before holding a debate on whether witnesses were required.

Challenging the Republicans, who have a 53 to 47 majority, to support his timetable, he asked: “Can the Senate still serve our founding purpose? Can we still put fairness, even-handedness and historical precedent ahead of the partisan passions of the day?”

This fit in with the White House defence team’s plans to call for a judgment in the trial after the questions. “We believe that once you hear those opening representations the only conclusion will be that the president has done nothing wrong,” Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, told the chamber.

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, argues against a Chuck Schumer amendment. Picture: AP.

Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House intelligence committee who is leading the prosecution, urged senators to decide at the outset that some witnesses should be heard – as happened in the trial of President Clinton.

“There’s an unbroken history of witness testimony in impeachment trials,” he said. He argued that this was more crucial than the verdict, which is seen as a foregone conclusion, given the two-thirds majority needed for conviction: “If the House cannot introduce evidence and call witnesses it is not a fair trial. It is not even a trial at all.”

Mr McConnell was scathing in his dismissal of the case made by the Democrats, saying that they had declined to see through any subpoenas for witnesses during the House of Representatives impeachment phase. “The House was not facing any deadline, they were free to run whatever investigation they wanted to run. If they wanted witnesses that would trigger legal battles over presidential privilege, they could have had those fights. They decided not to,” he said. “They decided not to pursue those witnesses they would now like the Senate to pre-commit to pursue ourselves. Nobody will dictate Senate procedure to United States senators.”

Mr McConnell warned: “Some of the proposed new witnesses include executive branch officials whose communication with the president lie at the very core of the president’s constitutional privilege. Pursuing those witnesses could indefinitely delay the Senate trial and draw our body into a protracted and complex legal fight.”

The Democrats’ ability to win the procedural arguments relied on trying to persuade four Republicans to join them to outvote Mr McConnell. Mitt Romney, thought likely to do so, said he would not consider that until a later stage. “The Democrats are making a big mistake when they call outrage time and time again. If everything is outrage then nothing is outrage,” he told CNN.