Mitt Romney Announces He Is Siding with Democrats To Vote To Convict Trump
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah announced Wednesday that he will vote to convict President Donald Trump in the Senate impeachment trial for abuse of power.
“The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust,” Romney said from the Senate floor, ahead of the vote on whether to convict Trump, according to Politico. “What he did was not ‘perfect.’ No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values.”
“The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor? Yes, he did.”
House Democrats passed two articles of impeachment in December accusing the president of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in relation to Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
During the call, Trump asked Zelensky to look into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine while the elder Biden was vice president and point man for the Obama administration’s policy toward Kyiv.
Neither impeachment article identified criminal conduct by Trump.
Sen. @MittRomney becomes the first GOP senator to say he will vote to convict in Trump’s impeachment trial.
“Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”https://t.co/W3ycY0PEQF pic.twitter.com/1arw8EclIs— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) February 5, 2020
The president placed a temporary hold on $391 million in military aid to the Ukraine the same month as the phone call, which he released in mid-September.
Romney said the reason he supported having former National Security Advisor John Bolton testify is that he hoped the former Trump aide could provide additional information that would allow the senator to reach a different conclusion about the president’s conduct.
The lawmaker said his conscience and a look toward the judgement of history informed his decision to vote to convict Trump for abuse of power.
“I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice. I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential,” Romney said.
“My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate,” he added, “but irrespective of these things, with my vote I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability believing that my country expected it of me.”
The senator said that future generations will be able to look at his vote and know that he believed what Trump did was “grievously wrong.”
The other three moderate Republican senators who political watchers thought might join with Democrats to convict Trump — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee — have all stated they will not.
In a Friday statement after the vote against calling in further witnesses, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “A majority of the U.S. Senate has determined that the numerous witnesses and 28,000-plus pages of documents already in evidence are sufficient to judge the House Managers’ accusations and end this impeachment trial.”
A total of 17 witnesses called by Democrats testified during the House impeachment inquiry.
A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll released earlier this week found that 53 percent of Utah voters give Trump a positive job approval rating, while 52 percent rated Romney favorably.
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