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Republicans Prepare to Acquit Trump, Defend Votes on Evidence

Polling released on Sunday showed Americans remain deeply divided over Trump’s impeachment.

Republicans Prepare to Acquit Trump, Defend Votes on Evidence
U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump walk across the South Lawn of the White House to board Marine One in Washington, D.C., U.S. (Photographer: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Senator Lamar Alexander will vote to acquit Donald Trump even though he says the president crossed a line by withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine as a way to “encourage” an investigation into a political rival -- the issue at the heart of Trump’s impeachment.

Alexander and fellow Republican Senator Joni Ernst on Sunday both defended their votes to prohibit new evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial. Ernst also said she would vote to acquit, while adding that Trump’s interactions with Ukraine were done “maybe in the wrong manner.”

Polling released on Sunday showed Americans remain deeply divided over Trump’s impeachment, mostly along partisan lines, and that the events of recent weeks have done little to shift opinion.

“I’m going to vote to acquit. I’m very concerned about any action that we could take that would establish a perpetual impeachment,” Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who’s retiring this year, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“It was wrong. Inappropriate was the way I’d say -- improper, crossing the line,” Alexander said of Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine. “He called the president of Ukraine and asked him to become involved in investigating Joe Biden.”

For there, “ the only question left is who decides what to do about that,“ Alexander said. “The people. The people, is my conclusion.”

The Senate on Friday sent the months-long impeachment inquiry to its final stages. A vote to acquit the president is set for Wednesday, after Republicans defeated Democrats’ efforts to call new witnesses.

Senators will hear closing arguments Monday then will have two days for debate before voting. That pushes the end of the process beyond the Iowa caucuses on Monday, the first votes to be cast in the 2020 presidential nomination procedure, and past Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.

“We’re still going to go into the Senate this week and make the case that this president needs to be removed,” Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic impeachment manager, said on Sunday.

“It will be up to the senators to make that final judgment, and the senators will be held accountable for it,” Schiff said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Ernst of Iowa, who’s expected to face a close race for re-election in November, said Trump’s pressure on Ukraine was “probably not something that I would have done.”

Argue All Day

“I will vote to acquit, because, again, whether you like what the president has done or not, we can argue this up one side and down the other all day,” Ernst said on CNN. “Does it come to the point of removing a president from office? I don’t believe this does.”

Schiff said it was “remarkable” that “you now have Republican senators coming out and saying, yes, the House proved its case. The House proved the corrupt scheme that they charged in the articles of impeachment.”

Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on “Fox News Sunday” that Democrats had failed in their goal to show that Trump needed to be removed.

“He hasn’t been acquitted, but he also hasn’t been charged,” Dershowitz said of Trump. “It’s the fault of [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi for failing to charge an impeachable offense.”

A possible quid pro quo with Ukraine matters “if what the president did was illegal or wrong,” Dershowitz said. But “if it’s not criminal, it doesn’t matter what the motive is.”

Deeply Divided

Polling released on Sunday showed U.S. voters remains divided along partisan lines about Trump’s impeachment.

Majorities believe the president abused his power in the Ukraine matter, and then obstructed Congress to stymie the investigation. But only 46%, mostly Democrats, would back Trump’s removal from office, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. That’s essentially unchanged from December.

“Public opinion looks like it did from the start: It was a hung jury then and it is a hung jury now,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey with Republicans pollsters at Public Opinion Strategies.

Many Democrats were already looking ahead to November.

“The Senate is the jury today, but we are the jury tomorrow and we get to send a message at the ballot box,” Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said Sunday on CNN‘s “State of the Union.”

“This is actually the year where there is accountability for the president,” Buttigieg said in a separate interview on NBC.

Sunday’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed the intensity of support for Trump is on the rise. The president’s overall approval was at 46%, consistent with levels from the past 18 months, but his “strong” job approval reached an all-time high.

The poll was conducted Jan. 26-29 of 1,000 registered voters, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ros Krasny in Washington at rkrasny1@bloomberg.net;Ana Monteiro in Washington at amonteiro4@bloomberg.net;Hailey Waller in New York at hwaller@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny

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