The Senate is expected to vote on Saturday over whether to condemn former President Donald J. Trump for inciting an insurrection – even when a Republican Congresswoman cast doubt on Friday about Trump’s legal team’s denial that he allied with the protesters. at the Capitol on January 6. .
With its verdict, the Senate will end what is on its way to being the fastest presidential impeachment trial of all time, making a judgment for history on Trump’s futile campaign to nullify his electoral defeat and his deadly conclusion when Congress met to certify the results.
Trump is expected to be acquitted, with many Republicans already registered supporting the view that his impeachment trial is unconstitutional. Such a result would reflect the conclusion of his first impeachment trial.
But on the eve of the expected vote, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington Republican, told a phone call described to her by Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, in which Trump would have sided with the protesters, telling the main House Republican that the members of the mob who invaded the Capitol were “more upset about the election than you are.”
There was no evidence that Ms. Herrera Beutler’s claim would alter the Senate timetable. But at least one Democratic senator, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, called for the process be suspended to depose Mr. McCarthy.
The Senate trial, Trump’s second impeachment trial in just over a year, ends an extraordinarily dangerous chapter in the history of American democracy and its tradition of peaceful transfers of power from one government to another.
On Friday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers exposed their defense, arguing that he did not incite the attack on the Capitol and claiming that his statements to supporters that day, in which he told them to “fight like hell”, were protected First Amendment.
Using less than a quarter of the 16 hours allocated to them for oral arguments, they denounced the trial as an exercise in political retribution undertaken by Democrats eager to prevent a detested political opponent from presenting itself again.
They aired clip after clip of Democratic politicians, including many senators, using the word “fight”, an attempt to establish equivalence with Trump’s incendiary comments and paint Democrats as hypocrites.
Later on Friday, the prosecution and defense teams answered questions from senators.
The Senate is due to meet again at 10 am on Saturday. Administrators of the impeachment of the Chamber, as the prosecution is known, could still request a debate and vote on the summons of witnesses, but they were not expected to do so. The prosecution and defense will each have up to two hours for the final allegations before the final vote takes place.
Seventeen Republican senators would need to join all 50 Democratic senators to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump on the only charge of “inciting insurrection” he faces.
Fani T. Willis, the top prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia, is targeting former President Donald J. Trump and several of his allies in their newly announced investigation into election interference.
Ms. Willis and her office have indicated that the investigation, which she revealed this week, will include Senator Lindsey Graham’s call in November to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on postal ballots; the abrupt removal last month of Byung J. Pak, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, who won Trump’s enmity for not presenting his debunked claims about electoral fraud; and the false allegations that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, made before state legislative committees.
“An investigation is like an onion,” Willis told The New York Times in an interview. “You never know. You pull something back and then you find something else.”
She added: “Anything that is relevant to attempts to interfere in Georgia’s elections will be subject to review.”
Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham, said he had no contact with Willis’s office. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller called the Georgia investigation “the Democrats’ last attempt to score political points.”
Trump’s activity is central to Georgia’s inquiry, particularly his call last month to Raffensperger, during which Trump asked him to “find” votes to erase the loss of the former president in the state.
Ms. Willis, whose jurisdiction covers much of Atlanta, has exposed a number of possible criminal charges in recent letters to state officials and agencies asking them to preserve documents, providing a partial map of the potential exposure of Trump and his allies.
Trump’s calls to state officials urging them to subvert the election, for example, may conflict with a Georgia statute that addresses the criminal solicitation to commit electoral fraud, one of the charges described in the letters. If this charge is prosecuted as a crime, it is punishable by at least one year in prison.
Mrs. Willis, 49, is a veteran prosecutor who won a centrist record. She said in the interview that her decision to pursue the investigation “is really not a choice – for me, it is an obligation”.
“Each public prosecutor in the country has a specific jurisdiction for which they are responsible,” she added. “If an alleged crime happens within your jurisdiction, I think they have a duty to investigate it.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Friday that he planned to meet with former President Donald J. Trump in the coming weeks to “talk about the future of the Republican Party”, which remains fractured after the month of January 6 attack on the Capitol.
With Trump, his allies and loyal voters targeting Republican lawmakers who criticized the former president’s role in the attack, including some who voted for his impeachment, Graham’s plans are the last indication that top Republicans have not left the former president’s corner. president and are seeking his support as they try to regain power in Washington.
“I believe the test for the Republican Party is: can we get the House and / or the Senate in 2022?” Mr. Graham said. “For that to happen, Trump needs to work with everyone.”
Late last month, California deputy Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, met with Trump on his Florida property for what aides described as a “good and cordial” meeting, and most Republicans are expected to Senate acquits Trump as early as Saturday at the impeachment trial.
Like McCarthy, Graham initially rebuked the president for his comments on January 6 and his slow reaction to the crowd that attacked the Capitol. But his comments on Friday, outlining his planned message to the president, indicated that he was fully determined to continue to repair the barriers between Republicans in Congress and the president.
He said the race for Republicans to try to win back the House and Senate “initiates Trump’s return in terms of that he was an important president with good policies”.
“I will try to convince you that we cannot get there without you, but you cannot keep the Trump movement without the GOP together,” said Graham as he left the Capitol on Friday night. “If we go back in 2022, then it is an affirmation of its policies. But if we lose again in 2022, then it will be – the narrative will continue, that not only have you lost the White House, but the Republican Party is in a bad situation. “
But he added: “If it’s about revenge and chasing people you don’t like, we will have a problem.”