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‘Country’s VICTORY’: Donald Trump as US senate acquits him of impeachment charges
The acquittals protect President Trump from being removed from office, as sought by Democrats, but do not overturn his impeachment in the House of Representatives.
The Republican-led US senate on Wednesday acquitted President Donald Trump of both articles of impeachment charging him with abusing power and obstructing congress, bringing to an expectedly tame end to months of heightened political drama that had engulfed Washington DC.
Trump was acquitted by a 52-48 of the charge of abuse of power, with one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voting to convict him and remove him from office, and 53-47 on the charge of obstructing congress. Republicans lead the 100-member body with a 53-47 majority.
“It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is hereby, acquitted of the charges in said articles,” Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, who presided over the five-week long senate trial as required by the American constitution, said after the second vote.
The acquittals protect President Trump from being removed from office, as sought by Democrats, but do not overturn his impeachment in the House of Representatives. Trump will forever be counted as the third American president impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999; no president has been removed from office yet.
Trump described the votes as the “Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax” in a tweet in which he said he will make a public statement on them Thursday.”
But the president was clearly bothered about the Romney vote as he tweeted an attack ad denouncing Romney as “slick, slippery and stealthy” and the “Democrats’ secret asset”, joining in, and endorsing, the vicious attacks already underway on Romney. The president’s eldest son, Don Trump Jr, said the senator was now officially a member of the “resistance”, referring to Republicans opposed to the president, and called for his expulsion from the party.
Romney’s solitary Republican vote to hold the president guilty of abuse of power would not, and did not, have any influence on the final foreordained acquittal, but it did deny the president a “bipartisan acquittal” his aides had signalled optimistically
Romney, who ran against President Barack Obama in 2012, has had a complicated relationship with the president. Trump endorsed Romney in his 2012 run, but Romney didn’t reciprocate. He slammed Trump as a conman and a fraud when he was running for the White House in 2016. But, when Trump won, Romney lined up to audition for a job in Trump’s administration, secretary of state.
“The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust,” Romney said in a speech on the senate floor before the vote Wednesday.
