WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitt Romney still has questions. What’s not clear is whether he’ll get to ask somebody who would know the answers.
After six long days of arguments contesting the guilt or innocence of President Donald Trump, senators started questioning the respective legal teams Wednesday as the impeachment trial grinds toward a decision whether to remove a president from office for the first time in history.
But Romney doesn’t believe the House managers prosecuting the case or Trump’s legal team have the answers he wants.
“I have some questions ... that I think John Bolton may be able to provide information on, and I’d like him to be able to tell us,” the Utah Republican said on a bumpy subway ride from his office to the Capitol before trial convened.
“For instance, at the time the president made the decision to withhold aid to Ukraine, what did he say was his reason? We haven’t heard that and I’d like to know that,” Romney said. “I’d like to know if there was ever an effort on the part of the president to tell Ukraine that aid was being held up and what reason? Those things we don’t know.”
After stepping off the train, the freshman senator was quickly engulfed by dozens of reporters and cameras wanting to know his chances of hearing from Bolton, the former national security adviser.
In what could be the finals days of Trump’ impeachment trial, Romney is at the center of a contentious debate over subpoenaing news witnesses and documents.
The House passed two articles of impeachment last month. One charges the president with abuse of power for freezing military aid to Ukraine to pressure that country to investigate political rival Joe Biden. The other accuses Trump of obstructing Congress while House Democrats investigated his dealings with Ukraine.
The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to acquit Trump. Most GOP senators want do that this week, before Tuesday’s State of the Union address, rather than prolong the trial with additional witnesses, who could also embarrass or damage the president. But that was complicated over the weekend by news reports that Bolton wrote in a leaked manuscript of a forthcoming book that Trump told him military aid to Ukraine was being withheld in exchange for investigations the president sought.
The news prompted Romney to speak out, reiterating his desire to hear from Bolton and igniting a debate about witnesses that had been simmering since the trial began.
Late Tuesday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he didn’t have the votes to block a call for additional witnesses like Bolton or other top White House aides. But he has until Friday to get his caucus in line, and his supporters are confident that will happen.
Romney and fellow Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have publicly expressed interest in hearing from additional witnesses. And just one more would need to break ranks to reach the 51 votes needed to request additional witnesses.
Romney said he’s expressed his views in private meetings with other senators, and neither leadership nor the White House are asking him to stand down from his demands to have Bolton testify. He said he’s not individually lobbying people to his side.
“I’m focused on what is the right vote I can make. Each senator/juror has to make the same decision for themself, and you do what you believe is right and let the consequence follow,” he told reporters, riffing on a hymn familiar to adherents of his Latter-day Saint faith.
The vote on witnesses will take place Friday. Until then, senators will be asking questions of House managers and the president’s counsel. On Tuesday, Senators stood to announce they had questions then handed their written queries to a page who quickly delivered them to a clerk on the dais. Chief Justice John Roberts then read each question to the corresponding legal team.
Roberts enforced his five-minute response rule for attorneys, cutting them off with a polite “thank you counsel” when time expired.
Although Romney has made his case to hear from Bolton, he also submitted a list of questions for prosecutors and the defense. Utah’s senior Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican, is helping the GOP senators sort through the questions to group duplicative questions into a single query. And he also added a few of his own that were posed Wednesday.
McConnell’s office decided the order in which GOP questions were asked. The first was a combined question from Collins, Murkowsi and Romney directed to the president’s attorneys.
They asked how to consider abuse of power if the president “had more than one motive for his alleged conduct, such as the pursuit of personal political advantage, rooting out corruption and the promotion of national interests.”
White House attorney Patrick Philbin explained that if the president is acting in the public’s interest, even if part of the motive is personal interest, a case for impeachment fails.
“All elected officials to some extent have in mind how their conduct, how their decisions, their policy decisions will affect the next election. There’s always some personal interest in the electoral outcome of policy,” Philbin said.
Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz later seconded that argument, noting that’s why “it’s so dangerous to psychoanalyze a president” as a basis for impeachment.
In the evening, Romney asked when did Trump first order the hold on security assistance to Ukraine and did he explain the reason for it at that time.
Philbin said there is no precise date in the record, but White House budget officials first became aware of the hold on July 3. He said a June 24 email from the Department of Defense addressed Trump’s concerns about Europe sharing the burden of aid to Ukraine and said Trump expressed that and concerns about corruption to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on a July 25 phone call and “later in the summer.”
The value of Bolton’s testimony was raised in the first Democratic question, coming from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. He asked if there was any way to render a verdict without hearing from Bolton and others. Lead House manager Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman from California, began his answer, “the short answer to that question is no.”
Lee rose within the first hour and handed a question to the page for Trump’s attorneys that touched on his contention that the impeachment is an effort by a “deep state” of career government employees who disagree with Trump’s foreign policies.
“The managers say the president contravened U.S. foreign policy. Isn’t it the president’s place to set foreign policy?” Roberts read from the paper handed to him.
Philbin walked to the lectern facing the senators and responded, “Of course it is.” He then elaborated that a president can’t defy agencies that are subordinate to him.
Similar soft-ball questions and answers that employed video clips and slides, made it clear that many of the questions were anticipated and intended to let Republican and Democrats — and the viewing public — hear the answers they wanted.
Democrats asked few questions of Trump’s legal team, just as Republicans asked few questions of the House managers. Among the latter was a question from GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas who asked Schiff about a hypothetical involving Romney, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2012.
“If President Obama had evidence that Mitt Romney’s son was being paid $1 million per year by a corrupt Russian company and Mitt Romney had acted to benefit that company, would Obama have authority to ask that that potential corruption be investigated?”
Schiff replied, “Whether justified or unjustified, to target their political opponent is wrong and corrupt, period, end of story.”