McConnell says U.S Senate could start Trump Impeachment Trial in January 2020

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On Wednesday, the Majority Leader in the U.S Senate, Mitch McConnell said the Republican-led chamber could start an impeachment trial of President Donald Trump next month. McConnell said that if the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives approves articles of impeachment, introduced on Tuesday, then the trial in the Senate will be the first order of business in January. The comments of McConnell came just hours before the House Judiciary Committee was scheduled to start considering whether to recommend 2 articles of impeachment to the full House for a vote. These articles charge the U.S President with abuse of power and obstruction of the U.S Congress. The charges were generated from Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to announce investigations of his political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The impeachment inquiry from Democrats was focused on a July phone call to Ukraine in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden (a 2020 presidential frontrunner) and his son Hunter (served on a board of a Ukrainian gas company). Trump also needed an investigation into a discovered conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections. Trump administration was withholding nearly 400 million U.S dollars in military aid from Ukraine at the time of the call. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and tweeted on Tuesday that there “WAS NO PRESSURE”.

Democrats are rapidly moving in their impeachment inquiry since they launched an investigation on 24^th September. The House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has experienced a legal and political challenge of balancing the views of her majority while hitting the Constitution’s bar of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. A number of liberal members in the U.S Congress needed expansive charges encompassing the findings from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Democrats had to take action because Trump had endangered the U.S Constitution, jeopardized national security, and undermined the integrity of the 2020 election.