In response to Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she may withhold sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate until the upper body’s majority leader agreed to conduct a fair hearing, Mitch McConnell ripped into the House leader. On Thursday morning, McConnell attacked the entire impeachment process, saying Pelosi and Democrats “may be too afraid” to send over their “shoddy work.” He decried the entire process as the “most unfair” in history, according to Fox News .
The House voted to impeach Donald Trump in a late-night vote on Wednesday, submitting two articles of impeachment against the president — one for obstructing Congress and one for abusing the power of his office for his role in allegedly pressuring Ukraine to benefit him politically. The vote largely went along party lines, with not a single Republican supporting the impeachment and only one Democrat — Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii — voting “present” rather than support the impeachment articles. With the vote, Trump became the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.
Then, in a last-minute decision, Pelosi announced that she might not turn the articles of impeachment over to McConnell after all, as The Inquisitr previously reported. Pelosi reasoned that she believes that the president will not get a fair trial in the Senate after McConnell said that he refuses to be an impartial juror and won’t allow the Senate to call witnesses during the trial.
“This particular House of Representatives has let its partisan rage at this particular president create a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future,” McConnell said.
McConnell went on to call the impeachment process “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history.”
McConnell addressed Pelosi’s suggesting that she may withhold the articles of impeachment from the Senate.
“House Democrats may be too afraid… to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate.”
He added that the move was “comical.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2019
Despite McConnell’s challenge to Democrats to move the process forward, he reconfirmed on Thursday that he intended to push the Senate to acquit Trump before the trial has been held, potentially supporting Pelosi’s claim that impeachment wouldn’t get a fair hearing in the Senate.
If Pelosi did decide to withhold the articles, Trump would go down in history as having been impeached but not able to claim exoneration if the Senate acquits him, which it is expected to do since the upper body is controlled by Republicans.
Meanwhile, Trump continued to rail against the impeachment on social media, saying that the process is an attack on him and his followers.