Senate's Acquittal No Acquittal at All, Dems Say, Warning of More Trump Abuses

Democratic leaders said the Senate's acquittal of President Donald Trump, after a short trial without evidence or additional witness testimony, doesn’t count as an acquittal at all. And on Wednesday they warned that Trump will continue to seek foreign interference to help his re-election.

“The eyes of the nation are upon this Senate, and what they see would strike doubt in the heart of even the most ardent patriot,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said just before the vote. “The president abused the great power of his office to try to cheat in an election, and the Senate majority is poised to look the other way.”

Trump’s lawyers countered that Democrats were out to “steal two elections,” as White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told the Senate, by voiding his 2016 victory agamst Hillary Clinton and barring him from the ballot in November.

House Democrats have vowed to continue other investigations into Trump, even leaving open the possibility of subpoenaing former national security adviser John Bolton, who said he was willing to testify in the Senate trial but never got the chance.

The fight over witnesses escalated last month after The New York Times reported that Bolton wrote in a book manuscript that Trump directly tied his decision to withhold $391 million in military aid from Ukraine to the effort to extract a a public announcement by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that his government would investigate political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Hunter had been paid to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company -- Trump's interactions with Ukraine were the basis of the impeachment articles delivered to the Senate by the House.

Bolton, who left the White House on bad terms with Trump, is calling his memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” a title that captures his direct knowledge of events in the Oval Office that most witnesses before the House impeachment inquiry recounted secondhand.

For Republican senators, 23 of whom face re-election this year, the political ramifications of the trial were inescapable. Fresh revelations from new witnesses could have tarnished the GOP’s standard-bearer and endangered GOP incumbents.

But any challenge to the president -- even on procedural matters -- risked a primary challenge and a backlash from the party’s fervently pro-Trump base.