All hell has broken loose tonight with Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Kevin McCarthy
Just when it seemed Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial was about to end with an embarrassing whimper for him and his legal team, followed by a quiet acquittal and the need to wait for Trump’s inevitable criminal trial to finish him off, everything is suddenly hitting the fan tonight.
It started when the news broke that Kevin McCarthy got Trump on the phone during the Capitol insurrection and asked for help, but Trump instead taunted him over it. Then came the revelation from within Mike Pence’s camp that Trump was lying when he claimed he didn’t know Pence’s life was in danger during the attack.
Now House Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump, is publicly calling on anyone who was standing next to Trump or Pence on January 6th to come forward and testify about what was really going on.
We’ll see what the impeachment managers do next. If this were a criminal trial, McCarthy, Pence, everyone around them would be forced to immediately testify about what transpired. Because the impeachment trial is just a congressional exercise, any subpoenas can be dragged out indefinitely in court, meaning anyone who doesn’t want to testify can’t realistically be forced to. But if McCarthy and/or Pence are subpoenaed to testify in the impeachment trial, will they risk looking complicit by refusing to do so? Things could be about to get rather fluid.
