Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a letter to Republican colleagues that he would vote to win 45-year-old President Donald Trump, the Politico website reported today, Saturday morning New York time.
According to the report, McConnell “told GOP colleagues in a letter that he would vote for Donald Trump in the presidential impeachment trial, according to sources familiar with the media.”
McConnell declined to reveal whether he intends to convict or acquit Trump ahead of the impeachment trial, telling reporters he intends to hear both sides of the debate, even though there were initial indications in light of his January 19 Senate speech that Trump bears heavy responsibility for the masses who Strong people, “among them of course McConnell alluded directly to the president himself.
“I think that’s what we need to do. That’s what I said before it started. That’s still my view,” said McConnell, who appears to have changed direction after seeing Republican Cleese Cheney severely hurt by support during Trump’s ouster.
The minority leader has previously told colleagues that their vote will ultimately be a matter of “conscience.”
Things do look different from his January 19 statement that the same people who incited the crowd, he said, “tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific procedure of the first branch of the federal government that they did not like,” he said.
Democrats and establishment media outlets had hoped McConnell would lead Republicans to convict the 45th president, but his conviction apparently remained unreasonable given that 44 Republican senators, including McConnell, questioned the constitutionality of the trial.