President Donald Trump is spoiling for an impeachment trial in the Senate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) insisted Thursday. “I just left President Trump. He’s mad as hell,” Graham told Fox News. “He is demanding his day in court.”
Graham made the comments a day after he said he would oppose allowing any witnesses for the president’s day in court.
Graham on Thursday was addressing the threat by House Democratic leaders to withhold the two articles of impeachment approved on Wednesday from the Senate until that chamber’s GOP leadership commits to a fair process for the trial.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is pressing for a trial that includes documents and witness testimony.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), like Graham, has pushed back against calling witnesses.
Graham called House leaders’ threat to not immediately transmit the impeachment charges to the Senate a “political stunt” — and characterized it as “buyers’ remorse.”
The House has “no case, and now they don’t know what to do next,” he told Fox News host Brett Baier. The case against Trump “sucks,” he said, adding that the president is also angered that the House now might “deny him his day in court” ― again ignoring the GOP position that would squelch a full-fledged trial.
Earlier in the day, Graham tweeted that a House refusal to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate would be a “breathtaking violation of the Constitution.”
Graham had vowed on Wednesday that “I am not going to support witnesses being called for by the president. I am not going to support witnesses being called for by Sen. Schumer.”
He added that he wanted as “short a trial as possible.”
A new ad by the Republicans for the Rule of Law features Graham, then a House member, pressing the Senate in 1999 to allow witness testimony during the impeachment trial for President Bill Clinton.
“In every trial that there has ever been in the Senate regarding impeachment, witnesses were called,” Graham, one of the House impeachment managers, said at the time. “When you have a witness telling you about what they were doing and why, it’s the difference between the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Check out what else Graham had to say on Fox in the clip up top.
