House Impeachment Manager Plaskett Says Senate Republicans Privately Told Her Dems ‘Made the Case,’ But Still Voted to Acquit Trump
One of the House Impeachment Managers, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI), said that several Senate Republicans privately conceded to her that the Democrats had successfully “made the case” to convict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection, but they still voted to acquit him nonetheless.
During an appearance on Cuomo Prime Time on Monday night, the delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands explained that some of the Senate GOP jury pool effectively said they couldn’t publicly acknowledge what they privately believed about Trump’s impeachable offense. But she started off by noting that the final bipartisan vote of 50 Democrats and seven Republicans voting to convict was more significant than the tally appeared.
“I don’t believe that what we saw among those people are what is the majority of Americans,” she said of the 43 Senate holdouts. “Remember that we had 57 senators who voted to convict the president, and those 57 senators represent even more than 57 percent of the population of this country. Those states that they represent are much broader than a 57 percent coalition.”
“And so I try to take comfort in individuals like the 10 Republicans on the House side, those seven Republicans on the Senate side who voted with their conscience and really believed in upholding their oath, and saw facts for truth and believed that they needed to speak up for truth as what we should be working with,” she continued. “And those are the individuals that I’ll reach out to and try to bring along.”
“It’s a low bar, but I guess you’ll need something to hope on if you’re going to do the job,” a skeptical Cuomo replied.
“I had senators, even after we presented, who stopped me in the hallway. Republicans, who said that we had made the case, yet they were going to vote to acquit the president,” Plaskett then said, of responses that were eerily similar to the seemingly contradictory, but public positions of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “When I would even offer them, you know, a potentially get-out-of-jail-free card saying why don’t you vote to convict in the first instance and then not vote to disqualify him, which only requires a majority? The response was, ‘Well, I don’t think you’ll get to 17 so I’ll never get to that second disqualification vote and I don’t want to stand out on a limb by myself.”
“That sounds exactly what’s echoed all through their ranks,” Cuomo responded.
Recounting how the failed Reconstruction period following the Civil War led to the rise of viciously racist Jim Crow laws, Plaskett warned the country cannot repeat the same mistakes.
“I believe that January 6th was, in effect, a second kind of Civil War — and it was necessary for us to have a reckoning,” Plaskett concluded. “For those individuals who made war against our democracy would be brought to justice, and that they needed to be held account for. That’s what I saw as my duty and my service to my country. I believe that we were on the front lines, to save our union and our republic. But I do believe even though we lost that case that we have shown who Donald Trump is. We’ve shown the enemy that was among us, that was attempting to lead us, that was using us for his own greed and power, and that he will not have the same power he had should he ever attempt to run again.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
