Shortly after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced Tuesday morning that the House will vote on an impeachment managers resolution Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) defended her decision to hold back the impeachment articles for three weeks.
During an interview on ABC News Tuesday morning, Schumer argued that Pelosi’s delay in sending the articles to the Senate has allowed Democrats to focus on getting witnesses and documents.
“The bottom line is this: we Democrats — three weeks ago I sent a letter to Mitch McConnell saying we wanted the truth to come out in this trial, we wanted witnesses, we wanted documents — who’s ever heard of a trial without witnesses and documents?” Schumer said.
After saying that the House “requested a limited number of witnesses — all of whom were eyewitnesses to what President Trump is alleged to have done” with his Ukraine pressure campaign — Schumer asked if “Americans want foreign powers interfering in our elections.”
“It should be the American people who decide,” Schumer said. “So it’s serious stuff and over the last three weeks, we have been able to focus on getting witnesses, documents.”
Schumer then pointed out that “these witnesses, by the way, are not what Republicans say– (that) they’re ‘Democratic plants’ — they’re the people appointed by President Trump: Mulvaney and Bolton and Blair and Duffy.”
After saying that he doesn’t know what the Trump-appointed witnesses will say at the trial, Schumer said that “some of the Republicans are now beginning to say, maybe we need witnesses and documents” as he doubled down in defense of Pelosi’s impeachment articles delay.
“Had Nancy sent the stuff right over and McConnell moved to dismiss, who knows what would have happened?” Schumer said.
Earlier Tuesday, the White House appeared to changed its tune on the allowance of additional witnesses in the trial when deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told “Fox and Friends”: “The President is not afraid of a fight and if you or anyone within the sound of our voices had been falsely accused of a crime, with no proof, and no evidence, for more than three years, you’d want every witness to come forward too and say, ‘this man did nothing wrong,’”
Watch Schumer’s remarks below:
Schumer on delay in sending impeachment articles to Senate: "Some of the Republicans are now beginning to say, maybe we need witnesses and documents. Had Nancy sent the stuff right over and McConnell moved to dismiss, who knows what would have happened?" https://t.co/2mVDkgMrGX pic.twitter.com/EbPOkwXCsK
— ABC News (@ABC) January 14, 2020
