US Politics

Despite US president Joseph Biden’s concern over making the most of any honeymoon period to pass his legislative agenda, Congress is now consumed by the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Impeachment itself is a vague process with few concrete rules. This makes the importance of understanding these rules and the procedure for this unprecedented Senate impeachment trial of a former president extremely significant and of great historic consequence.
While each impeachment is uniquely confined to a particular context or controversy, the process itself has been consistently defined by the same vague references contained in the constitution. The constitution confines impeachment to cases of what it refers to as “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours”.
While this phrase had precedent in British common law, the issue of defining an impeachable offence has often revolved around investigating a suspected abuse of power. We saw this, for example, in Trump’s first impeachment trial. In that case, Congress examined whether Trump had encouraged Ukraine to interfere in the US election campaign by investigating Biden – his anticipated opponent. The Senate, with a small Republican majority at the time, voted largely along party lines to acquit the president.
Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives “has the sole power” to consider impeachment. If a simple majority from the House votes in favour of even one article of impeachment, the president is impeached. They must then be tried by the Senate.

Too often, the term impeachment is only understood as the removal of a politician from office. But while three US presidents have been impeached by the House of Representatives (Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in both 2019 and 2021), none has been convicted by the Senate.
Richard Nixon, the 37th president, resigned from office in 1974 to avoid an impeachment trial that seemed certain to remove him from office. But the full consequences of a successful impeachment process itself have never occurred and debate over the role of partisanship continues with increasing concern over the potential for impeachment to become an exercise in partisan loyalty.
Day of rage: Trump supporters descending on the US Capitol on January 6. EPA-EFE/Will Oliver
The House passed a single article of impeachment against Trump, for “incitement of insurrection”, the charge now being considered by the Senate. There is no standard process for an impeachment trial. The guidelines for the trial are agreed by senators to reflect the particular circumstances.
In this case, Trump has declined to speak in his own defence and, while there is an option to include witnesses, it is not compulsory. This case is particularly suited to first-person testimony from members of Congress, as the lawmakers themselves were witnesses to the alleged crime as it unfolded at the Capitol. There is also video footage that could provide evidence in the trial.
Impartial justice
Senators are sworn in to act in the capacity of jurors. Duty to country and constitution is intended to come first over party loyalty, with senators swearing to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws”. The House impeachment managers act as prosecutors, while the president has a team of lawyers for his defence.
Nine Democrats have been chosen by the House speaker, Nanci Pelosi, to act as impeachment managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
As we saw in Trump’s first impeachment, the chief justice of the Supreme Court is meant to oversee a president’s trial in the Senate, as stipulated by the constitution. But, as Trump is no longer in office, Chief Justice John Roberts has passed this responsibility over to president pro-tempore of the Senate, Patrick Leahy. The senior senator from Vermont was chosen by his fellow senators to act as the presiding officer, in respect for his longstanding public service in office.
House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, with the Article of Impeachment against Donald Trump on January 13, 2021. EPA-EFE/Shawn Thew
The Senate impeachment trial culminates in a vote on whether to convict. A successful impeachment requires a two-thirds majority of senators – 67 votes – to convict. This final vote will be preceded by closing arguments limited to four hours and followed by deliberations. The unlikelihood of the almost evenly divided Senate (50 Republicans, 48 Democrats and two Independents), convicting Trump has obscured the debate over what convicting a politician who has already left office would look like.
Partisanship has already been apparent in 45 Republican senators voting against holding an impeachment trial in the first place. The argument over the whether the trial is constitutional has become part of the process – the first day of debate in the trial has been devoted to the matter. The impeachment trial proceeds if there is a majority of 51 votes in favour. According to the constitution, the vice president, Kamala Harris, can only vote in the Senate in cases of a 50-50 impasse.
With a majority in favour, the trial should begin in earnest with each side presenting their arguments. It has been agreed that this process should not exceed four days. Following this, there will be four hours for senators to ask questions, succeeded by two hours debating motions subpoenaing documents and witnesses, as called for by House managers. The trial will be extended to include discovery and witnesses, if the Senate votes in favour of these motions.
Read more: Impeaching a former president – 4 essential reads
David Schoen, Trump’s lawyer, initially asked for the trial not to continue through the Jewish Sabbath. It was decided that the trial would pause through Friday evening and Saturday, continuing on Sunday February 14. However, Schoen has now withdrawn this request giving the trial potential to go through the weekend. Despite this being Valentine’s Day weekend, the current hyper-partisanship in Congress is unlikely to inspire many sentiments of affection or congeniality. More

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial opened in the Senate with graphic video of the attack on the Capitol on 6 January and his comments that spurred a rally crowd to become a mob.
The lead House prosecutor told senators the case would present ‘cold, hard facts’ against Trump, who is charged with inciting the siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Joe Biden
Trump second impeachment: live updates More

As the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump loomed in Washington on Tuesday, a matter even more important to his immediate future was being discussed some 990 miles to the south by the town council of Palm Beach, Florida: whether the former president can continue living at Mar-a-Lago.The council will hear their attorney’s opinion on whether it can stop Trump living at his club. Nearly 30 years ago, in 1993, a Trump lawyer told the town the New York property magnate would be prohibited from living at Mar-a-Lago, if the town allowed him to convert it from a residence to a club.The promise, however, was not included in a written agreement which may now take precedence.Technically, Trump is an employee of the corporation that owns Mar-a-Lago – and the written agreement only bars members from living there. Under town regulations, a club can provide onsite housing to employees. Trump moved into Mar-a-Lago on 20 January, the day he left office.In December, the south Florida town received a letter from an attorney representing a Mar-a-Lago neighbor, demanding it stop Trump living there. The unnamed neighbor believes Trump’s residency will decrease property values.Trump and former first lady Melania Trump changed their residency from New York City to Mar-a-Lago in 2019. The Trump Organization has issued a statement saying: “There is no document or agreement in place that prohibits President Trump from using Mar-a-Lago as his residence.”Trump owns two other homes near Mar-a-Lago, which he bought for $10m in 1985 from the estate of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the owner of General Foods. The 126-room mansion had deteriorated after her death in 1973, when she left it to the government as a possible presidential vacation home. The government gave it back in 1981.Trump spent millions upgrading the property while living there part-time. By the early 1990s, however, he was in financial distress. He told the town he could no longer afford the $3m annual upkeep and it was unfair he shouldered the costs alone. He proposed subdividing the property and building mansions. The town rejected the proposal.In 1993, Trump and the town agreed he could turn the estate into a private club limited to 500 members. The initiation fee is now $200,000. Annual dues are $14,000. Members can stay for no more than seven consecutive days and 21 days a year – but there is no prohibition on employees living there.According to Palm Beach Post articles from 1993, Trump’s attorney Paul Rampell told the town council that Trump would be treated like any other member.“Another question that’s often asked to me is whether Mr Trump will continue to live at Mar-a-Lago,” Rampell said. “No, except that he will be a member of the club and therefore will be entitled to the use of guest rooms.”The length of Trump’s stays at Mar-a-Lago before his presidency are unknown, but they often exceeded seven days while he was in office and added up to more than 21 days a year.Trump clashed frequently with the town before he became president. Neighbors complained about noise, traffic and a car lot-sized US flag and its 80ft pole, which Trump erected in 2006 without proper permits. Trump got a shorter pole and agreed to have his foundation give $100,000 to veteran charities.He then put the pole on a mound, so it would still rise to 80ft.Despite the public squabbles, Trump performed well in November’s election among his neighbors – in Mar-a-Lago’s precinct, he got 62% of the vote. More

As states around the country advance a wave of measures that would make it harder to vote, Democrats in Washington are planning the most sweeping voting rights protections in decades. But to pass those protections, Democrats will have to overcome a huge barrier.Shortly after taking control of the US Senate last month, Democrats made it clear that they wanted to move quickly to advance a version of the massive voting rights bill that passed the US House last year. The measure would require every state to offer automatic, same-day and online voter registration. It would require states to let anyone vote by mail if they wish and implement new guidelines to prevent states from being overly aggressive in how they purge their vote rolls. It would also strip state lawmakers of their power to redraw congressional districts every 10 years, curbing their ability to draw lines that virtually guarantee re-election.Democrats are also considering separate legislation to restore a key provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that would require states with a history of discriminating against voters to get any voting changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect.Though they control both chambers of Congress and the White House, Democrats won’t be able to pass either measure unless they get rid of the filibuster, a procedural maneuver the minority party in the Senate can use to block legislation that doesn’t have the support of 60 senators.Democrats are divided on whether to get rid of the filibuster, and it’s unclear whether they will ultimately do so. Those who favor scrapping the procedure argue that it is impeding a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect the right to vote. Not doing so, they say, would amount to giving Republicans a free pass to continue a brazen effort to restrict voting rights and entrench their power amid a shifting electorate that appears less likely to favor the GOP.The filibuster should not block Democrats from passing a major voting rights bill and a new voting rights act, Eric Holder, who served as US attorney general from 2009 to 2015, said in a statement to the Guardian. Both measures, he added, were “badly needed corrections and reforms that will strengthen our democracy”.“The reality is that too many in the Republican party have grown comfortable manipulating our political system for partisan advantage,” added Holder, who is leading the Democratic effort to combat excessive partisan gerrymandering. “The Senate should not allow the filibuster, which was once used to stop civil rights legislation, to now stop critical bills that would protect and strengthen our democratic system.”Stacey Abrams, the former former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who helped flip her state blue in 2020, also urged Democrats in Washington to go full throttle to protect voting rights.“Democrats in Congress must fully embrace their mandate to fast-track democracy reforms that give voters a fair fight, rather than allowing undemocratic systems to be used as tools and excuses to perpetuate that same system,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in which she endorsed getting rid of the filibuster.“This is a moment of both historic imperative and, with unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress, historic opportunity.”The last few weeks have crystallized the need for those protections as states that saw record turnout have taken up bills that would make it harder to vote. In Georgia, where Democrats won for the first time in decades amid record turnout, Republicans are weighing measures to require voters to submit ID during the mail-in ballot process and to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting. Republicans in Arizona, another state Democrats flipped in 2020, are considering legislation to make it easier to remove voters from a permanent vote-by-mail list and to require mail-in ballots be notarized.Across the country, at least 165 bills in 33 states would make it harder to vote, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.Danielle Lang, a voting rights attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, noted that lawmakers who campaigned on strengthening America’s voting laws now had an obligation to see it through.“Failure to act is not an option,” she wrote in an email. “While we averted democracy disaster in 2020 – due to the sheer willpower of election officials, organizers, and voters nationwide – it would be folly to ignore the warning sirens it set off.”The filibuster has a long history of impeding civil rights legislation in America and has been deployed to try to block civil rights protections, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When Barack Obama spoke at the funeral for John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died last year, he called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic” that should be eliminated to pass sweeping voting rights legislation.The filibuster also essentially allows a small minority of senators to exercise outsize influence over legislation, thwarting the will of the majority. “It’s supremely ironic that something that gives rural, sparsely populated states so much power already would further kind of entrench minority rule and further make it difficult to access the ballot box,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, a government watchdog group.Keeping the filibuster in place and not passing sweeping voting reforms would have “profound downstream effects”, Spaulding added.“The American people chose new leaders; they want a responsive government,” he said. “To have essentially a minority of senators exercising veto power over the entire legislative process is just not gonna be tenable.” More

When Georgia representative and sometime QAnon enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene met with fellow House Republicans on Feb. 3, she may have apologized. Or she may not have.
During the closed-door meeting in which Greene’s conspiracy theory beliefs came up, we don’t know exactly what went down because, well, it was behind closed doors.
Speaking after the event, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy described Greene’s remarks as an apology, saying that Greene had denounced her previous statements and social media postings – which included the idea that mass school shootings are “false flag” operations and that California forest fires were started by Jewish space lasers – and that “she said she was wrong.”
U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of 10 Republicans who voted in support of the 2021 impeachment of Donald Trump, had a different take: “She was somewhat contrite, but personally I never heard an apology.” He added: “I didn‘t hear an ‘I’m going to say this publicly.’”

As a scholar who has written about the art of the public political apology, I found the whole episode fits into a larger pattern of nonapology apologies in the modern political landscape.
Sorry seems to be the hardest word
An apology, according to the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, is “a splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and a part that stands back and sympathizes with the blame giving.” Goffman goes on to say that after an offense has occurred, the job of the person apologizing is to show an understanding of the norm violated and the harm done.
What this means in practice is that offenders must identify what they did wrong and then demonstrate that they take responsibility for that wrong, that they accept the blame. To be a true apology this has to be accompanied with some sincerity and with a sense of how the offender will act differently in the future.
If a public apology includes these four elements – naming the harm, taking responsibility, sincerely accepting blame and committing to act differently – then it can help repair a relationship or even save a reputation.
Even if we are to take McCarthy’s word that an apology occurred in Greene’s case, we are none the wiser as to which parts of her embrace of QAnon and other conspiracies she had said sorry for.
The day after the Republican conference meeting, Greene took to the floor of the House of Representatives and characterized her past posts in this way: “These were words of the past and these things do not represent me, they do not represent my district and they do not represent my values.”
She went on say that she had “stumbled across” QAnon and “was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret.”
So, is this to be taken as an apology?
Whether Marjorie Taylor Greene has met the criteria established by Goffman is, at best, open to interpretation.
But she isn’t alone – good public apologies seem rare today.
‘Mistakes were made’
Part of the difficulty has to do with the loss of standards held in common by a community. For a scholar like Goffman, it was taken for granted that an apology reflected common norms of behavior.
Gone are the days when Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy could agree, as they did in their second debate in 1960, that the United States should apologize when it is wrong, as when a long-planned Paris summit in 1960 collapsed after it was revealed the U.S. had covered up spy-plane flights over the Soviet Union. They naturally disagreed about whether the U.S. was in the wrong, but they agreed that apology was sometimes necessary.
Nixon went on to become an expert in the art of the nonapology, as seen in his response to the Watergate scandal. His “mistakes were made” approach, which uses a passive voice to avoid laying the blame directly on oneself, was later adopted by others, including Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra affair.
Today’s culture is too fractured for most public figures to risk a full-fledged apology. In the U.S., gerrymandered districts, continual fundraising appeals to a base, hyperpartisan media and a polarized electorate have conspired to deliver an environment in which apologizing is fraught with concerns. If one apologizes, it signals a backtracking to the base one is courting. If one refuses to apologize, that rallies supporters and donors.
In such circumstances, it is hard to admit you are wrong much less that you have behaved badly. In such an environment, it is perhaps understandable why Greene’s apology was behind closed doors and not delivered in public.
‘Never make excuses’ might have been a more accurate line for John Wayne’s Capt. Brittles. Silver Screen Collection/Moviepix via Getty Images
The death of the public apology has been long in the making. It fits an approach best exemplified by Nathan Brittles, a character played by actor John Wayne in the John Ford Western “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” The 1949 film popularized the expression “Never apologize – it’s a sign of weakness,” which has become the slogan of a type of public toughness over the past half-century. Ironically, that slogan is misunderstood; Nathan Brittles takes responsibility for the failure of his mission in the movie. The line should be “Never make excuses – it’s a sign of weakness.”
This (mis)understanding of the apology as a sign of weakness has certainly been the mantra of Donald Trump for many years. The former president’s style was to attack and insult, playing effectively to a base, and never say sorry.
Four-star apology
In the absence of public apologies from elected political leaders, perhaps it is better to look to the military, like the fictional Capt. Brittles, for outward signs of contrition.
While Trump avoided taking responsibility over failings in the response to the coronavirus pandemic, the four-star general heading the government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, Gustave Perna, was more accountable.
Speaking in late December, Perna took responsibility for how errors in the projections of COVID-19 vaccines to be distributed resulted in states getting fewer doses than they had been promised.
“I want to take personal responsibility for the miscommunication. I know that’s not done much these days. But I am responsible. And I take responsibility for the miscommunication,” he said, adding, “I failed. I am adjusting. I am fixing. And we will move forward from there.”
That apology names the harm, takes responsibility, accepts blames and commits to doing better. And it was delivered in public, in stark contrast to Greene’s expressions of regret.
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The lethal Capitol invasion by Donald Trump supporters that is at the heart of the former president’s second impeachment trial happened more than a month ago. But Democrats leading the prosecution of Trump are counting on an element of surprise.Surprise, the impeachment prosecutors are calculating, because while most Americans understand the broad outlines of what happened during the 6 January attack on the Capitol, relatively few have come to grips with the shocking audio and video footage from that day – portraying a cauldron of violence, vandalism, bloodlust and fear.And in what is shaping up as history’s first made-for-TV impeachment trial, Democrats are planning to make some of these surreal scenes the centerpiece of their case against the only president ever to be impeached twice.A police officer crushed in a doorway. A woman wearing a Trump flag shot in the neck. Mobs in Trump gear breaking doors and smashing glass, and hunting the halls of legislature for members to tear “into little pieces”. Staffers for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, huddled under a conference table, sending texts for help, as rioters pound on the doors. A woman trampled to death as her friend begs for space.And the chants: “The steal is real!”, “Hang Mike Pence!” and “USA! USA! USA!”A Senate split 50-50 will act as jury at the trial, and Trump is expected to retain enough Republican support to avoid conviction and a ban on his holding future office.But the prosecutors’ case as previewed this week is not principally directed at lawmakers. Instead, it is unmistakably pitched to the public.Impeachment managers led by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland are expected to draw on hours of previously unseen footage from body cameras worn by police, from the media and from live streams captured by the insurrectionists themselves to produce what is shaping up as a shocking inside account of the Capitol attack.With unique access to evidence gathered by law enforcement officers in nearly 140 cases related to the invasion so far, the prosecutors will try to break through calcifying versions on both sides of the political aisle of what happened, and to provoke a new reckoning with how close the country came to an act of mass violence inside the halls of government.That realization, they think, could jolt a reconsideration of Trump’s guilt for the article of impeachment with which he has been charged: incitement of insurrection.The Huffington Post politics reporter Igor Bobic was inside the Capitol that day – but outside either legislative chamber – and captured some of the most notable footage of the invasion.“One month since the attack and I’m still learning harrowing details about the day,” he tweeted at the weekend. “Staffers I haven’t seen since recalling how they barricaded themselves in offices in terror. Members telling me how they followed my feed on their phone while in the chamber in disbelief. Reporters still trying to make sense of it all. All of us still coping.”Last month Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was forced into hiding during the invasion, described hearing threats from insurrectionists and told thousands of followers on Instagram Live: “I thought I was going to die.”Trump’s defense team seemed to sense the danger to their case that the video scenes represented, and in a brief submitted on Monday they floated multiple pre-emptive responses.Heatedly condemning the attack on the Capitol and denying Trump’s complicity, the defense accused Democrats of “a brazen attempt to further glorify violence” by presenting the facts of the case. In a footnote, the lawyers went so far as to suggest that the crowd was a mix of pro-Trump and anti-Trump elements.Trump’s quotes were expected to be juxtaposed with scenes of violence at the CapitolBut the footage may make plain what no legal argument might deny. The crowd proceeded from a rally at which Trump spoke and arrived at the Capitol wearing red hats and Trump 2020 flags, mixed in with militia patches, white supremacy group insignia, Confederate flags and illegal firearms and knives.In an initial brief submitted last week, the impeachment managers described Trump’s “singular responsibility for the assault”, mustering dozens of quotations in which the former president spread the falsehood of a stolen election, demanded intervention, then “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue”.Trump’s quotes were expected to be juxtaposed with scenes of violence at the Capitol, as prosecutors hope to make a case that will drive home their charges against the former president.“We cannot, for a moment, treat the attack of 1/6 as something normal that happened,” tweeted Andy Kim, a Democratic representative from New Jersey. “It was a truly dark day in our nation’s history and it deserves a response of that magnitude.”It may be history’s first made-for-TV impeachment. But as for President Joe Biden, his press secretary, Jen Psaki, said his attention would be elsewhere: “He will not spend too much time watching the proceedings.” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe second impeachment trial of Donald Trump will begin in the US Senate on Tuesday, with the former president facing a charge of “incitement of insurrection” after his supporters stormed the US Capitol last month and engaged in clashes that left five people dead.The prosecution is expected to brandish dramatic footage of the violence at the Capitol on 6 January. The trial is set to strike a sharp contrast of tone with Trump’s first trial in early 2020, at which prosecutors used documents, emails and testimony to tell a complicated story about a Trump pressure campaign in Ukraine.This time the alleged crime scene is much closer to home – in the very chamber where the trial will play out, which was invaded by Trump supporters moments after members of Congress and staff had been evacuated.With a majority of Americans expressing horror and outrage at the attack on the Capitol, the allegations against Trump could land much more powerfully with the public than did the story of his seeking political favors from Ukraine in return for official acts.Seeking to defuse the incendiary potential of the footage that Democrats are preparing to air on the Senate floor, defense lawyers for Trump on Monday made the extraordinary claim that presenting the events of the attack would amount to “a brazen attempt to glorify violence”.The defense team, led by Bruce Castor, a former county prosecutor from Pennsylvania, also argued in a legal brief that the Senate does not have jurisdiction to try Trump, because he has already left office. Additionally they claimed that Trump’s speeches and tweets whipping up a frenzy about false election fraud did not amount to incitement and were protected under the first amendment.The prosecutors sent by the House of Representatives, known as impeachment managers, are led by Jamie Raskin of Maryland and represent an entirely new team from Trump’s previous impeachment.The core of their argument, laid out in an 80-page brief submitted last week, documents statements Trump made and tweeted, from “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” to “Election Rigged & Stolen” to “they’re not taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell, I’ll tell you right now” to “So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!”Dozens of the nearly 140 people who have been charged so far in relation with the Capitol attack have argued as part of their criminal defenses that they stormed the building because the president told them to.The trial is expected to last at least through the week, but leaders from both parties are seen as not wanting it to run as long as the prior impeachment trial, which stretched to 15 days over January and February.An early push by Democrats to call witnesses at the current trial, possibly including police officers who were injured in the attack, lost momentum out of concerns that a longer timeline could interrupt efforts by the Joe Biden administration to pass a $1.9tn Covid-19 aid and economic relief package into law and pursue other policy initiatives.Under rules that were still being settled on Monday, the trial would begin with four hours of debate Tuesday on the constitutional questions of whether the Senate can try a former president in an impeachment proceeding and whether the Senate’s power to bar an official from seeking office again hinges on the antecedent act of “removal”.Each side would then have up to 16 hours starting at noon Wednesday, under draft rules, to make their cases.In a pre-trial brief filed Monday, lawyers for Trump argued that the former president’s false claims about a stolen election were protected by the first amendment and did not amount to an incitement to violence.“Even taking every one of Mr Trump’s prior statements about the election in the most negative light, they were, at most, only abstract discussions that never advocated for physical force,” the brief said.Unlike at his first impeachment trial in early 2020, Trump is at risk this time of suffering multiple defections by Republican senators outraged by the threat to their personal safety and dreaming, perhaps, of a longshot opportunity to jettison Trump from core conservative politics.But 17 Republicans would need to join Democrats to convict Trump and then bar him from holding office in the future – a tally that appears all but unattainable.Trump is the only president in US history to be impeached twice. There have been impeachment proceedings against three other presidents: Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson. None was convicted at trial.In 2019, Trump was impeached in the House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but he was acquitted in the Senate with only one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, voting to convict. More

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterPaul Manafort, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, will not face mortgage fraud charges in New York, after the state’s highest court declined to revisit lower court decisions that barred prosecuting Manafort on double jeopardy grounds.The New York court of appeals decision last week closed the door on charges against Manafort in the matter and came less than two months after then-president Trump pardoned him in a similar federal case that had put him behind bars.Manafort’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, said he was pleased with the ruling.“This is a case that should never have been brought because the dismissed indictment is a clear violation of New York law,” Blanche said, echoing his stance since the state charges were brought in March 2019.The decision of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, to charge Manafort was widely seen as a hedge against the possibility Trump would pardon him for federal crimes. Trump’s pardon does not cover state offenses.Vance’s office declined to comment.Manafort was convicted in federal court of tax and bank fraud charges involving allegations he misled the US government about lucrative foreign lobbying work, hid millions of dollars from tax authorities and encouraged witnesses to lie on his behalf.Less than a year into his nearly seven-and-a-half-year sentence, he was released to home confinement in May because of concerns about the coronavirus.Trump pardoned him just before Christmas.Vance, a Democrat, filed the state charges minutes after Manafort’s sentencing in the federal case. The Manhattan case alleged Manafort gave false and misleading information in applying for residential mortgage loans from 2015 to 2017; he was also charged with falsifying business records and conspiracy.Manafort’s lawyer quickly raised the double jeopardy claim, saying the New York case was essentially a copy of the federal one.Vance’s office contended its case was exempt from state double jeopardy protections because the charges involved different aspects of some of the offenses covered in the federal case.A trial court judge, and then an intermediate appeals court, disagreed.Vance’s office appealed to the state’s highest court, the court of appeals, in November.The state’s chief judge, Janet DiFiore, took on the matter herself and issued a one-page decision denying Vance’s office an opportunity to pursue its appeal further, effectively ending the case.The New York Times was first to report the news of DiFiore’s decision. More