Acquitted: White House taunts ‘shameful’ Democrats as Trump cleared by Senate

Donald Trump and the White House have angrily denounced Democrats, accusing them of launching a “sham” impeachment attempt, after the Senate voted to acquit the president of two charges and permitting him to concentrate his energies on re-election.

In a vote almost entirely along party lines, the upper chamber voted not to convict the president on two articles of impeachment that were passed by the House. The Senate voted to acquit him 52-48 on charges of abuse of power and 53-47 on obstruction of congress.

While Mr Trump remains only the third president to be impeached by the House, the vote by the Senate means he can remain in the White House and seek a second term.

“The sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J Trump. As we have said all along, he is not guilty,” the White House said in a statement.

“The Senate voted to reject the baseless articles of impeachment, and only the president’s political opponents – all Democrats, and one failed Republican presidential candidate – voted for the manufactured impeachment articles.”

It added: “In what has now become a consistent tradition for Democrats, this was yet another witch-hunt that deprived the president of his due process rights and was based on a series of lies.”

Only Mitt Romney, a moderate who was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, broke ranks and voted to convict and remove the conservative populist GOP president – showing how much the party has changed in eight years, and putting his own political future in question.

But, for Mr Trump, the moment certainly will bring a sense of vindication even though nearly half of Americans believed he acted inappropriately and deserved to be impeached then removed from office.

House Democrats impeached Mr Trump late last year on charges he abused his office by pressuring senior Ukrainian officials to investigate his domestic political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden, and wrongfully stonewalled congress as Democratic lawmakers tried to look into the matter.

The president announced in a tweet that he intends to make a statement at noon on Thursday about the impeachment matter. Meantime, his top surrogates took the lead slamming Democrats.

His 2020 campaign organisation also panned the opposition party.

“President Trump has been totally vindicated and it’s now time to get back to the business of the American people,” said campaign manager, Brad Parscale. “The do-nothing Democrats know they can’t beat him, so they had to impeach him. This terrible ordeal was always a campaign tactic to invalidate the 2016 votes of 63 million Americans and was a transparent effort to interfere with the 2020 election only nine months away. And since the president’s campaign only got bigger and stronger as a result of this nonsense, this impeachment hoax will go down as the worst miscalculation in American political history.”

As they delivered a prosecution case, seven House Democratic managers – led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a man the president has tried to discredit by calling him “Schifty” – argued during hours and hours on the Senate floor that Mr Trump would “cheat” to “steal” November’s election and second term unless removed from office.

“Every single vote, even a single vote by a single member, can change the course of history,” Mr Schiff said on Monday, almost begging a single GOP senator to buck the brash Republican president who remains uber-popular with conservative Americans. “It is said that a single man or woman of courage makes a majority. Is there one among you, who will say, ‘Enough”.”

Though Mr Romney answered that call, Mr Schiff and Democrats fell far shy of the 67 votes they needed to convict Mr Trump on one or both of the articles. A conviction on just one would have been enough to remove him from office and install vice president Mike Pence as the 46th commander in chief.

Chief justice John Roberts banged his gavel on the Senate chamber dais at 16.41 [21.41 GMT], after minutes earlier declaring Mr Trump had been “acquitted of the charges in said articles”. Mr Trump will remain in office, now cleared to focus almost exclusively on his re-election campaign. He emerges from the impeachment saga with then highest approval ratings of his presidency and looking like a tougher and tougher proposition come election day.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the vote that he believed speaker Nancy Pelosi was “dragged” into the impeachment inquiry by the far left part of her caucus, then oversaw a “rush job” of a process to “get it over in the other body”, meaning to the Senate and off her plate. He contended Ms Pelosi’s actions suggests the matter was a “thoroughly political” one for House Democrats, a contention the speaker and other Democrats have denied.

But, notably, he declined to answer several questions about whether he believes the president’s actions were appropriate.

Mr McConnell also claimed House and Senate Democratic leaders were mostly interested in “bogging” down the Senate in an attempt to take back control of the chamber. He also said Ms Pelosi’s initial instinct was right, citing Mr Trump’s elevated poll numbers. “Right now, this is a political loser for them. They initiated it. They thought this wa a great idea,” he said. “And, at least in the short term, it has been a colossal political mistake.”

He compared Mr Trump’s impeachment to that of Andrew Johnson in 1868. ”They just didn’t like him. Sound familiar?” the majority leader said with a grin. “I guess my message to the House ... is don’t do partisan impeachments.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer addressed reporters a few minutes later, saying Mr McConnell “covered it all up” after essentially claiming a moral victory because his members left the chamber with their “heads held high”.

“I’m proud of my caucus,” he said, declaring they “fought” for “the truth” and “the facts”, adding: “It was a day, a week, two weeks where the crucible of the nation was tested ... A lot of Republicans, Leader McConnell, failed to live up to that test.”

Asked about Republican senators standing by the president, Mr Schumer said they did so because they fear the president and likely backlash. He claimed Mr Trump’s “acquittal is virtually valueless” because there were no witnesses allowed in the Senate trial, something for which he slammed Mr McConnell.

“He didn’t address a single charge,” Mr Schumer said of his GOP counterpart’s final statement just before the vote. “All he could do was attack, attack, attack. Attack Democrats. Attack the House.”

Ultimately, Republican senators mostly fell into two camps: One concluded Mr Trump’s actions were inappropriate, but failed to rise the level or impeachment or removal. The other staunchly contended he did nothing wrong and acted in the country’s interests.

GOP senators took to the floor this week in a marathon of speeches, largely echoing points made by the president’s legal team during their hours laying out their defence of the president. They presented various arguments, including: Mr Trump did nothing wrong; the president’s actions were not impeachable; and nothing a president does can be inappropriate because every action is, by definitions challenged by many legal scholars, in the country’s interests.

And both camps of Republicans echoed the defence team by saying voters – not senators – should decide if Mr Trump’s actions warrant a new president being sworn in next January.

“The constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate,” retiring senator Lamar Alexander said on the floor on Wednesday.

“The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did,” the Tennessee Republican said. “I believe that the constitution clearly provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that began on Monday in Iowa.”

Some legal scholars and congressional Democrats are warning that the acquittal votes will incorporate the defence team’s expansive description of presidential powers into US legal canon, giving Mr Trump – and his successors – broad sway to take actions that previous chief executives never would have considered.

But Marc Hetherington, a University of North Carolina political science professor, says, to have a repeat of the Ukraine affair, it would take a “rare” instance of “a similar character rising to the presidency”.

“His business career was premised on challenging norms and breaking rules,” he said of Mr Trump. “His presidency has been characterised by the same behaviour.”

At the White House, press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Mr Trump “is pleased to put this latest chapter of shameful behaviour by the Democrats in the past, and looks forward to continuing his work on behalf of the American people in 2020 and beyond”.