Trump impeachment: Democrats to continue push for Bolton to appear as witness – live

Today is day two of the question-and-answer sessions in the impeachment trial, and it is expected to be another eight hours of queries from senators to the impeachment managers and Trump’s lawyers.

Some Democratic senators are pushing for Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts to break a tie on witness testimony if the final vote is 50-50.

Democrats may only manage to pick off three Republican senators — most likely Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — for the witness proposal. In that case, the final vote on calling witnesses would be 50-50.

Usually, 50-50 votes in the Senate are broken by the vice president, but that’s not possible in this case because of Mike Pence’s conflict of interest in the impeachment trial.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that he will consider a tie vote to be a failed vote, so witnesses will theoretically not be called if the vote is 50-50.

That’s why some Democratic senators are calling on Roberts, who was nominated by George W Bush, to break the tie. But that would be a pretty extraordinary step for Roberts, so the odds of it happening seem low.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Paul Owen.

Even Democratic senators are sounding skeptical they will be able to pass their proposal to call witnesses in the impeachment trial. When asked about the likelihood of calling witnesses, senator Sheldon Whitehouse said this morning, “I doubt it.”

Meanwhile, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is planning for a quick acquittal tomorrow night if the witness proposal fails, according to majority whip John Thune.

“In the end it’s going to be up to the leader, but my view would be at that point you would want to start bringing this thing to a conclusion,” Thune said yesterday. “I’m not sure there would be any value or any point in keeping it going.”

Here Lauren Gambino explains more about how the Democratic primary race works:

Away from the impeachment, the Democratic presidential race begins in earnest on Monday with the Iowa caucuses.

Leftwinger Bernie Sanders is in a strong position there, according to polling averages, although caucuses – in which voters gather for local meetings to demonstrate their support for a candidate and win over anyone else they can – can be hard to poll.

New Hampshire will follow on 11 February, and Sanders is polling even better there (his home state of Vermont is next door). After that attention turns to Nevada, where centrist Joe Biden is ahead, and South Carolina (ditto), before the shape of the race really starts to become apparent when over a dozen states and territories, including California and Texas, vote on Super Tuesday, 3 March.

Biden is some distance in the lead in Texas, but Sanders has a slight lead in California.

The Democrats have no winner-takes-all primaries, so winning large states will not give any of the candidates a knock-out blow at this stage. Nationally Biden is leading in the Democratic race, but Sanders has now cut his lead to a pretty narrow margin.

General election polls show both beating Trump in the popular vote, but not by much, and of course in 2016 Trump lost the popular vote but won in the electoral college.

While the focus at the impeachment at the moment is on whether the Democrats can persuade four Republicans to join them in calling for more witnesses, the GOP is also hoping it can peel off a few Democrats to vote to acquit Donald Trump at the conclusion of the proceedings. As the Washington Post reports:

Under the spotlight are two centrist mavericks who won election last year — Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — as well as Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who will face voters this year after a long-shot win in a special election in 2017.

Republican senator Tim Scott notes that any defections “would be a huge win because any bipartisan acquittal is big deal”.

The Republican leadership in the Senate is increasingly confident that they have enough votes to block witnesses being called in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, according to Axios. The news site notes the wily tactics of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell:

Sources familiar with the meeting tell Axios that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his conference that they did not yet have the votes to block witnesses, knowing that the news would likely leak to the media and alarm some senators who dread both a prolonged impeachment trial and Trump’s Twitter wrath.

No 1 on the witness list for Democrats would be former national security adviser John Bolton, who has been issued with a “formal threat” by the White House to stop him publishing his forthcoming book, in which he claims Trump directly linked a delay in military aid to Ukraine to a condition that the Ukrainian government investigate one of his Democratic rivals, Joe Biden. The White House is claiming the book “appears to contain significant amounts of classified information”, CNN reports.

“We do not believe that any of that information could reasonably be considered classified,” Bolton’s attorney responded. The exchange apparently took place last week, before the New York Times revealed what Bolton’s book said and plunged his account into the centre of the impeachment debate.

Here’s a poster for an upcoming New Hampshire gig by a live act who exhumed styles and ideas thought to be long-dead and suddenly made them seem fresh and exciting again… and Bernie Sanders.

My colleague David Smith has interviewed Brad Parscale, Trump’s formidable and controversial election campaign manager. He says the Republicans have “an advantage in time” over their Democratic opponents going into November’s election.

The president was extremely smart the day after the election to say why take our foot off the gas? Election day 2016 wasn’t the end of the fight. It was the start of the fight. And let’s just keep going. Let’s keep fundraising. Let’s keep building. This is a fight for eight years. This isn’t a fight just for a few months.

David has also profiled Parscale here. Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman and senior adviser on the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, tells him:

Obviously the formula that they used in 2016 is something they’re going to try to duplicate in 2020, which is really the tactic of using social media to try to distort the truth and mislead the American people and con themselves back into the White House.

That’s part of the reason why he was made the campaign manager. It shows how much of a priority their misinformation digital strategy is to the re-election campaign.