Rick Santorum Gets Knocked Around on CNN for Defending Acquittal: ‘I Think You’re a Few Days Behind’

CNN analyst Rick Santorum had a rough morning trying to defend Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-TN) decision to vote against witnesses despite copping to President Donald Trump’s misconduct, and anchor John Berman had to remind him of key facts in the scandal surrounding the impeachment trial.

On Friday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, panelist Paul Begala ripped Alexander’s statement on impeachment witnesses, saying, “This thing is a farce, let’s just face it it’s a sham, you can’t have a trial without witnesses, and now you have a juror that says ‘Yeah he did it but I just don’t care.'”

Co-anchor Alisyn Camerota read Alexander’s statement, then asked Santorum, “So Rick, if you can use taxpayer dollars for your own political errands, where does that leave us?”

Santorum launched into an attack on the impeachment itself, then paraphrased a Republican question to the Democratic House managers, asking “Is there any evidence that any one of the Trump administration actually went to Ukraine and said ‘We are not going to give you this aid until you, until you, until you do what we ask you to do?'”

He then claimed that “the fact is, there’s no one who has alleged that ever happened, no one who, and nobody, there’s no evidence anywhere, there’s no suggestion there’s any evidence anywhere.”

“Well John Bolton called it a drug deal, there’s some deal that he was referring to if only we could know the details of that,” Camerota interrupted, over Santorum’s protestations.

“But no no, what Lamar is saying is look, the fact that the president withheld aid and that the president wanted something, that isn’t enough,” Santorum said. “There has to be, and even if there is, even if those things happen, under the statute, under the McDonald court case if you will, you, an official act… of having done, excuse me the Ukrainians doing something for quote political benefit, having a meeting or doing an investigation is not that bribery, it’s not sufficient. So even if you accept all of those things, it just doesn’t rise to the level of a high crime. It may have been inappropriate and that’s what Lamar tried to zing the president on, but it’s not a high crime.”

“Let me just say Senator, I think you’re a few days behind,” Berman said, then spoke over Santorum as he tried to interrupt.

“Because John Bolton is willing to say that the president told him that the aid was directly linked, hang on hang on hang on senator, what Senator Alexander said was that Democrats proved their case and I still don’t think it is worth removing the president,” Berman continued. “That’s where we are. We’re in a different place right now, you now have senators saying it all happened, it all happened, the House managers proved it.”

Later in the segment, Berman returned to Santorum, asking him, “What is to keep a campaign from opening an office of foreign interference outreach in the future? I mean seriously, you’re laughing at it but there’s nothing, right? Because the United States Senate is about to say it’s inappropriate but we don’t see any punishment, and not only don’t we see any punishment, we don’t want to hear evidence to that effect. What is to keep a president from doing, or this president, from doing the exact same thing tomorrow?”

“Well I don’t know, I would think that the last six months of the Trump, this presidency and what the House has gone through and what the media has put the president through is a pretty heavy price to pay,” Santorum said.

“He did this, we didn’t put him through anything,” Berman interrupted. “The president made the phone call, made the ask. This was his act.”

Santorum replied that he agreed the conduct was inappropriate but argued that Trump “is subject, as you know, to an election. And the public knows all of this, and you’re right there are a lot of people in the American public who don’t like the fact that the president did this, it’s now very public, everybody knows about it, and that’s, that’s a big cost, I mean he’s accountable to the people and that’s what really the House, the White House counsel was saying, which is what the people decide. Now you have all the facts, give the Democrats credit for hounding the president, going after him on this, it was very clear everybody has the facts laid out before them, make a decision and let the people decide whether they want a man like this who is capable of doing these things in the presidency or not.”

“He’s cheating in the election,” Begala pointed out.

“The American people don’t have all the facts yet because the Senate has kept John Bolton from testifying, and the White House has stopped John Bolton from testifying and is apparently keeping him from publishing his book, so there is more information out there that they are keeping, I just wanted to make that point,” Berman said.

Watch the clip above via CNN.