At one point, Trump told the vice president that he had spoken to Mark Martin, the former president of the North Carolina Supreme Court, that he said he told him that Pence had that power. Mr. Pence assured Mr. Trump that he did not. Mr. Trump made the vice president defend his reasoning at a meeting with lawyers that Rudolph W. Giuliani helped to form.
Both parties admitted that they did not have a clear picture of how many senators in the party could vote to condemn Trump.
Toomey said that Trump had “plunged into a kind of madness” since the election and effectively “disqualified” to run for office again. But a day after calling Trump’s conduct “unreachable”, Toomey argued that an impeachment would be impractical with Trump already on his way out.
“I think the best way for our country, Chuck, is for the president to resign and leave as soon as possible,” he told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “I recognize that it may not be likely, but I think it would be the best.”
Speaking to associates about the prospect of another impeachment, Trump was struck by the reality that few people on his defense team at the Senate trial last year would be part of any new lawsuit.
Jay Sekulow, who served as his principal personal lawyer, and two other private lawyers, Marty Raskin and Jane Raskin, will not participate in a future impeachment defense, according to a person informed about the planning, nor Pat A. Cipollone, the Lawyer of the White House, or Patrick F. Philbin, his deputy.
This time, only a few of his Capitol allies also offered to speak in defense. Among those who did, many used appeals for “unity” to argue against impeachment or calling for Trump’s resignation. In most cases, the adamant legislators that Democrats should let the country “move on” were among those who, even after Wednesday’s violence, voted to reject election results in decisive states that Biden won based on allegations of widespread electoral fraud in the courts and the states themselves said they were false.