Witnesses

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that he was not ruling out calling witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial — but indicated he was in no hurry to seek new testimony either — as lawmakers remain at an impasse over the form of the trial by the GOP-controlled Senate.

The House voted Wednesday to impeach Trump, who became only the third president in U.S. history to be formally charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But the Senate trial may be held up until lawmakers can agree on how to proceed. Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is demanding trial witnesses who refused to appear during House committee hearings, including acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security advisor John Bolton.

McConnell, who has all but promised a swift acquittal of the president, has resisted making any guarantees, and has cautioned Trump against seeking the testimony of witnesses he desires for fear of elongating the trial. Instead, he appears to have secured GOP support for his plans to impose a framework drawn from the 1999 impeachment trial of President Clinton.

“We haven’t ruled out witnesses,” McConnell said Monday in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” “We’ve said let’s handle this case just like we did with President Clinton. Fair is fair.”

That trial featured a 100-0 vote on arrangements that established two weeks of presentations and argument before a partisan tally in which Republicans, who held the majority, called a limited number of witnesses. But Democrats now would need Republican votes to secure witness testimony — and Republicans believe they have the votes to eventually block those requests.

In a letter Monday to all senators, Schumer argued that the circumstances in the Trump trial are different from those of Clinton’s, who was impeached after a lengthy independent counsel investigation in which witnesses had already testified numerous times under oath. Schumer rejected the Clinton model, saying waiting until after the presentations to decide on witnesses would “foreclose the possibility of obtaining such evidence because it will be too late.”

Schumer also demanded that the Senate, in addition to receiving testimony, also compel the Trump administration to turn over documents and emails relevant to the case, including the decision to withhold military assistance from Ukraine.

Schumer told the Associated Press on Monday that he stands ready to negotiate with McConnell, and that he hopes questions about witnesses can be settled “right at the beginning.” Without witnesses, he said, any trial would be “Kafkaesque.”

“Let’s put it like this: If there are no documents and no witnesses, it will be very hard to come to an agreement,” Schumer said.

If McConnell won’t agree, “We can go to the floor and demand votes, and we will,” he added.

Schumer told AP the Democrats aren’t trying to delay the proceedings, saying the witnesses and the documents his party is asking for are directly relevant to the charges in the House impeachment articles.

Meanwhile, the White House is projecting confidence that it will prevail in a constitutional spat with Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has delayed sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate in hopes of giving Schumer more leverage in talks with McConnell. But the White House believes Pelosi won’t be able to hold out much longer.

“She will yield. There’s no way she can hold this position,” Marc Short, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said Sunday. “We think her case is going nowhere.”

The impasse between the Senate leaders leaves open the possibility of a protracted delay until the articles are delivered.

Schumer told reporters in New York on Sunday that “the Senate is yearning to give President Trump due process, which means that documents and witnesses should come forward. What is a trial with no witnesses and no documents? It’s a sham trial.”

Trump has called the holdup “unfair” and claimed that Democrats were violating the Constitution, as the delay threatened to prolong the pain of impeachment and cast uncertainty on the timing of the vote Trump is set to claim as vindication.

“Pelosi gives us the most unfair trial in the history of the U.S. Congress, and now she is crying for fairness in the Senate, and breaking all rules while doing so,” Trump tweeted Monday from his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., where he is on a more than two-week holiday vacation. “She lost Congress once, she will do it again!”

Short called Pelosi’s delay unacceptable, saying she’s “trampling” Trump’s rights to “rush this through, and now we’re going to hold it up to demand a longer process in the Senate with more witnesses.”

“If her case is so airtight … why does she need more witnesses to make her case?” Short said.

White House officials have also taken to highlighting Democrats’ arguments that removing Trump was an “urgent” matter before the House impeachment vote, as they seek to put pressure on Pelosi to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate.

A close Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said Pelosi would fail in her quest “to get Mitch McConnell to bend to her will to shape the trial.” Graham is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was a House manager, comparable to a prosecutor, during the Senate’s impeachment trial of Clinton.

“She’ll eventually send the articles because public opinion will crush the Democrats,” said Graham. Asked whether he expected witnesses in the Senate, he replied: : “No, I don’t.”

At one point, Trump had demanded the testimony of witnesses of his own, such as Democrats Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and the intelligence community whistleblower whose summer complaint sparked the impeachment probe. But he has since relented after concerted lobbying by McConnell and other Senate Republicans who pushed him to accept the swift acquittal from the Senate and not to risk injecting uncertainty into the process by calling witnesses.

The Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said his party is looking for a signal from McConnell that he hasn’t ruled out new witnesses and documents. But Durbin acknowledged that Democrats may not have much leverage in pushing a deal.

He criticized both Republican and Democratic senators who have already announced how they will vote in the trial, saying the Constitution requires senators to act as impartial jurors. Republicans hold a 53-vote majority in the Senate.

“The leverage is our hope that four Republican senators will stand up, as 20 years ago, we saw in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and say, this is much bigger than our current political squabbles,” Durbin said.

The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict in an impeachment trial — and Republicans have expressed confidence that they have more than enough votes to keep Trump in office.

Short spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” Durbin appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and Graham was on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Islamabad, Pakistan – At about 12:30pm (07:30 GMT) on Tuesday afternoon, Khalid Khan, a 25-year-old lawyer, was waiting for his lunch with his friend, Fawad Khan, at the cafeteria of Islamabad’s District Judicial Complex.

Suddenly, a loud boom shook the cafeteria and the entire judicial complex.

“I first thought that the roof will collapse on me,” Khalid told Al Jazeera outside the complex, two hours later.

The complex had been hit by a suicide attack. According to official figures, at least 12 people were killed and more than 30 were injured, several of them critically, when the bomber blew himself up at the entrance of the court complex.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif blamed “India-backed proxies” operating from Afghanistan for carrying out the attack.

India, where a car explosion on Monday evening killed at least 13 people, said that it “unequivocally” rejects the “baseless and unfounded allegations being made by an obviously delirious Pakistani leadership”.

In a statement issued on Tuesday evening, Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, said Islamabad was attempting to “deflect the attention of its own public from the ongoing military-inspired constitutional subversion and power-grab unfolding within the country”, appearing to refer to the 27th constitutional amendment being debated in Pakistan’s National Assembly.

“The international community is well aware of the reality, and will not be misled by Pakistan’s desperate diversionary ploys,” Jaiswal added.

The constitutional amendment has sparked criticism from activists, sitting judges and opposition parties for granting lifelong immunity from criminal prosecution for the country’s senior-most military officers, and for setting up a parallel Federal Constitutional Court, which many fear could undermine the Supreme Court.

But on Tuesday, it was the District Judicial Complex in Islamabad that was shaken, as the impact blast there reverberated across South Asia.

The sound of the explosion was heard in nearby residential areas and office buildings. Soon after, videos of the incident went viral on social media, showing flames and plumes of smoke rising from a charred vehicle near a security barrier at the compound’s entrance.

In other clips, lawyers were seen rushing out to help those on the road as security personnel surrounded the premises.

Witnesses said that at the time of the blast, nearly 2,000 people were inside the complex, including judges, lawyers, litigants and court staff.

They described an explosion so powerful that windows in several courtrooms were shattered, and body parts were strewn across the site, including the head of the suicide bomber.

With different gates for entry and exit, and the main gate closed immediately after the blast, police initially instructed people to stay inside before allowing them to leave about 25 minutes later.

Muhammad Shehzad Butt, a 52-year-old lawyer, was among them. He said he had been heading towards the cafeteria when the explosion occurred.

“It was utter pandemonium, and in the panic, most of the people were trying to exit the complex, causing havoc at the gate, while many others tried to get back inside the building,” he told Al Jazeera outside the complex.

After the attack, authorities cordoned off the area, placing barriers to keep the media from entering or approaching the site where the suicide bomber detonated the explosives.

A large number of journalists gathered outside the compound, hoping to capture visuals, but officials initially denied them access.

By then, most litigants had left, though some lawyers lingered nearby, speaking with reporters and YouTube vloggers recording their accounts.

Butt, the lawyer, said that when he arrived at court in the morning, security checks appeared routine but thorough. However, he heard from colleagues that there was an additional layer of screening that day.

This was corroborated by Khalid, the lawyer from Quetta who has worked in Islamabad for the past five years.

“This morning, when Fawad and I reached the court premises, we had to wait slightly longer as there was extra checking at the entrance. There was no concern, but we just felt that maybe some VIP might be visiting the court or some delegation,” he said.

Despite the dozen people killed, including one lawyer, both Khalid and Fawad, who is originally from Swat, said they felt no fear about returning to work the next day.

“We have seen enough of this [violence],” Khalid said. “These things don’t scare us.”