Jeffrey Toobin Calls Out McConnell: He’s Making Trump Senate Trial a ‘Farce, Joke’ to ‘Engineer an Acquittal’ ASAP

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin pulled no punches in slamming the proposed Senate trial resolution released by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday as specifically orchestrated to clear President Donald Trump’s name with as little public scrutiny as possible.

Speaking with Anderson Cooper, Toobin made clear that McConnell’s proposed rules for Trump’s trial on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges fail his basic tests for fairness and interest in revealing the truth.

“Mitch McConnell is trying to make it a farce, trying to make it a joke,” Toobin said dismissively, zeroing in on the resolution’s stipulation that opening arguments would be limited to 24 hours, spread across just two days. “The trial will start every day at 1:00 in the afternoon. 12 hours [later] would be 1:00 in the morning. But that’s not how the Senate works. There will be breaks, so the idea is that McConnell wants to keep most of the evidence in the wee hours, so that nobody sees it. And then the real new atrocity, frankly, that McConnell added today, which I don’t think many people saw coming, was the idea that the House managers couldn’t even present their evidence without a vote from the full Senate. Something that’s completely new, and that was not true in the Clinton trial. It is all designed to engineer an acquittal as soon as possible.”

Cooper then asked a follow-up that addresses the absurd, chronological logic of McConnell’s preferred rules, the result of which could see House Democrats marshaling their case around facts and documents that the Senate has not even accepted yet.

“If the evidence has to be voted on at the end,” Cooper noted, “while the House managers are making their [opening] arguments, can they not use evidence from the House?”

“I think, the answer can’t be no,” Toobin said. “But just as an official matter, it is not received into evidence until later.”