“I know people feel a lot of fear and believe that if we had (a witness) maybe the senators would have done what we wanted, but listen, we didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines,” Plaskett, representing the major congressional district of the US Virgin Islands and serving as one of nine impeachment managers, CNN’s Jake Tapper told “State of the Union.”
Plaskett and her fellow executives were faced with questions about their decision to change course and not call witnesses in the trial, a move that disappointed some who believed that potential statements could have resulted in a stronger case and led to more Republicans. who voted to condemn the former president. But even with witnesses, Trump’s acquittal was pretty much guaranteed on Saturday, given that 17 GOP senators had to side with the Democrats to condemn him – a number that seemed out of reach from the start.
But after hours of negotiations between senate leaders, the managers and Trump’s legal team, the congressman’s statement was included in the trial record as evidence and no witnesses appeared at the trial, frustrating the Democrats who owned Herrera Beutler and Republican Representative John Katko. New York.
Plaskett said her team had heard that if they called witnesses, they risk losing some Republican votes – including the support of North Carolina Senator Richard Burr – but she told Tapper that in the end it didn’t affect on the decision of the managers.
“I think we wanted to get what we wanted and we did. We believed we had proved the case. We proved the elements of an article of impeachment,” she said. “Clearly these (senators) were hardened – that they didn’t want to have the president convicted or disqualified.”
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut echoed Plaskett’s feelings later in the program, telling Tapper, “I don’t know there were more than seven (Republican guilty votes) regardless of what they did or how long the trial took.”
Murphy, who said he believes the executives got “what they wanted” by filing Herrera Beutler’s statement in the report, argued that if Democrats had gone ahead with witnesses, the trial might have taken weeks because of the Senate rules that allowed for debate on motions. for witnesses.
“They might have lost votes if they had argued over witnesses for a week or two or three weeks,” he said.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the House’s chief impeachment manager, also defended the decision on Sunday to override the witness summons after introducing the idea at the Senate floor trial, telling NBC it wouldn’t matter if there were dozens of witnesses. called because it would not have overcome the “foolish arguments” of the Republicans.
“ We brought up the resolution at the time when the resolutions were called for witnesses under the Senate resolution – there’s no other time we could have done it, that’s the time to do it, we’ve got that vote We were and then the Republicans decided to have the evidence appear in the report, ”said Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland.
“We could have had 1,000 witnesses, but that couldn’t have overcome the kind of foolish arguments,” the Republicans added, he added.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Manu Raju, Ted Barrett, Lauren Fox and Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.