WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial may begin on inauguration day, just as Democrat Joe Biden takes the oath of office in an extraordinary end to the defeated president’s term in the White House.
The timeline and timeline for the trial is largely defined by Senate procedures and will begin as soon as the House delivers the impeachment article. This may mean the trial begins at 1 pm on the day of the investiture. The Capitol ceremony starts at noon.
Trump was impeached on Wednesday by the House because of the deadly siege of the Capitol, the only president in the history of the United States was twice accused of impeachment after a pro-Trump crowd stormed the building. The attack left the country’s capital, and other cities cited, under high security amid threats of further violence surrounding possession.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not say when she would take the next step to transmit the impeachment article, a single charge of inciting insurrection. Some leading Democrats have proposed to withhold the article to give Biden and Congress time to focus on the priorities of their new government.
Biden said the Senate should be able to split its time and do both.
The impeachment trial will be the first for a president who is no longer in office. And politically, this will force a reckoning among some Republicans who stood alongside Trump during his presidency and largely allowed him to spread false attacks against the integrity of the 2020 elections.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is open to considering impeachment, after telling associates that he ended Trump, but has shown no sign of how he would vote.
Calling the trial will be one of his last acts as a majority leader, as two new Georgia senators, both Democrats, will take office leaving the chamber divided by 50-50. This takes the majority to the Democrats as soon as Kamala Harris takes office, as the vice president is the tiebreaker.
In a note to colleagues on Wednesday, McConnell said he “has not made a final decision on how I will vote” in an impeachment trial in the Senate.
With the Capitol protected by armed National Guard troops inside and outside, the House voted 232-197 on Wednesday for Trump’s impeachment. The process has moved forward at lightning speed, with lawmakers voting just a week after violent pro-Trump supporters invaded the Capitol, prompted by the president’s calls to “fight like hell” against election results.
Ten Republicans fled Trump, joining Democrats who said he needed to be held accountable and threateningly warned of a “clear and present danger” if Congress left him out of control before Democrat Joe Biden took office on January 20. It was the most bipartisan presidential impeachment of modern times, even more than against Bill Clinton in 1998.
The Capitol uprising surprised and angered lawmakers, who were sent in search of security as the crowd descended, and revealed the fragility of the nation’s history of peaceful transfers of power.
Pelosi invoked Abraham Lincoln and the Bible, pleading with lawmakers to keep their oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign “and domestic”.
She said of Trump: “He must go, he is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love.”
Hiding in the White House, watching the process on TV, Trump later released a video statement in which he made no mention of impeachment, but appealed to his supporters to refrain from any violence or interruption of Biden’s tenure.
“Like all of you, I was shocked and deeply saddened by the Capitol calamity last week,” he said, his first conviction of the attack. He called for unity “to move forward” and said: “The violence of the crowd goes against everything I believe in and everything that our movement represents. … No true supporter of mine could ever disrespect the application of the law. “
Trump was first accused by the House in 2019 because of his negotiations with Ukraine, but the Senate voted in 2020 for absolution.
No president has been condemned by the Senate, but Republicans said it could change in the rapidly changing political environment, as office holders, donors, large companies and others move away from the defeated president.
Trump’s sentencing and removal would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate.
Biden said in a statement after the vote that it was his hope that the Senate leadership “would find a way to deal with its constitutional responsibilities in impeachment while working on other urgent matters in this nation”.
Unlike his first time, Trump faces this impeachment as a weakened leader, having lost his own re-election, as well as the Republican majority in the Senate.
In defending the “serious crimes and misdemeanors” required by the Constitution, the four-page impeachment resolution trusts Trump’s own incendiary rhetoric and the falsehoods he spread about Biden’s electoral victory, including at a rally near the White House on the day of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
The impeachment resolution also aims to prevent Trump from running again.
A Capitol Police officer died of injuries sustained in the rebellion, and police shot and killed a woman during the siege. Three other people died in what the authorities said were medical emergencies. The riot delayed the counting of votes from the Electoral College, which was the last step to finalize Biden’s victory.
Ten Republican lawmakers, including Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the Republican Party’s third leader, voted for Trump’s impeachment, dividing the Republican leadership and the party itself.
Cheney, whose father is the former Republican vice president, said of Trump’s actions in summoning the crowd that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president” in his office.
The president’s strong popularity with constituents of Republican lawmakers still had some influence, and most House Republicans voted against impeachment.
Trump would have been livid with McConnell and Cheney’s perception of disloyalty.
Security was exceptionally tight on the Capitol, with tall fences around the complex. Metal detector screening was necessary for lawmakers entering the Chamber, where, a week earlier, lawmakers huddled inside while the police, with weapons drawn, blocked the demonstrators’ door.
The impeachment project is based on Trump’s false statements about his defeat in the Biden elections. Judges across the country, including some nominated by Trump, have repeatedly rejected cases that challenged the election results, and former Attorney General William Barr, a Trump ally, said there was no sign of widespread fraud.
While some question the impeachment of the president so close to the end of his term, there are precedents. In 1876, under Ulysses Grant, War Secretary William Belknap was impeached by the House on the day he resigned, and the Senate called for a trial months later. He was acquitted.
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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Andrew Taylor Alan Fram, Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.