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      Donald Trump impeached a second time over mob attack on US Capitol

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      The House of Representatives on Wednesday impeached Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the government of the United States a week after he encouraged a mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol, a historic condemnation that makes him the only American president to be charged twice with committing high crimes and misdemeanors.
      After an emotional day-long debate in the chamber where lawmakers cowered last week as rioters vandalized the Capitol, 10 House Republicans joined Democrats to embrace the constitution’s gravest remedy after vowing to hold Trump to account before he leaves office next week.
      The sole article of impeachment charges the defeated president with “inciting an insurrection” that led to what the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said would be immortalized as a “day of fire” on Capitol Hill.
      The president, Pelosi said, represented a “clear and present danger to the nation we all love”.
      The final count was 232 to 197, with 10 members of the president’s party supporting his unprecedented second impeachment, making it the most bipartisan impeachment vote in US history. Among them was Liz Cheney, the No 3 House Republican and daughter of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president. Though she did not rise to speak on Wednesday, she issued a blistering statement announcing her decision, in which she said that there had “never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States” than Trump’s conduct on 6 January.

      “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” said Cheney in a statement.
      Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, attempted to carve a middle path for his caucus. He said Trump “bears responsibility” for Wednesday’s attack, while warning that impeachment would “further fan the flames of partisan division”. As an alternative, he proposed a censure. More

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      House poised to impeach Trump for a second time, following deadly Capitol riot

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      The US House of Representatives was poised on Wednesday officially to charge Donald Trump with inciting violence against the government of the United States one week after he rallied a mob of loyalists to storm the US Capitol, a historic measure that would make him the only American president to be impeached twice.The unprecedented effort gained momentum overnight as senior Republican leaders in the House joined Democrats in support of removing Trump from office.The single article of impeachment charges the defeated president with “inciting an insurrection” that led to what the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said would be immortalized as a “day of fire” on Capitol Hill.The president, Pelosi said, arguing in favor of invoking the constitution’s gravest remedy, represented a “clear and present danger to the nation we all love”.She was joined by six Republican members of the House, including Liz Cheney, the No 3 House Republican and daughter of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president.Cheney said in a statement that there had “never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States” than Trump’s conduct on 6 January.The deadly assault on 6 January came as both the House and Senate were in session to certify Joe Biden’s victory in November’s presidential election, a result Trump refused to accept. Five people died during the siege, including a police officer.“We are debating this historic measure at an actual crime scene, and we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the president of the United States,” said the congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat of Massachusetts and chair of the rules committee, opening Wednesday’s session.The emotionally charged debate took place against a constant reminder of the death and destruction that had transpired just one week ago. The building lawmakers call the People’s House, poorly defended last Wednesday, by this Wednesday had been turned into a fortress, protected by thousands of national guard troops and with metal detectors stationed outside the chamber doors. Some Republicans rebelled against the new safety protocols, evading the security check.A remorseless Trump on Tuesday called his inflammatory language at a rally immediately before the mob marched on the Capitol “totally appropriate”. Efforts to hold him accountable were nothing more than a “continuation of the greatest witch-hunt in the history of politics”, he said.Few Republicans were willing to defend Trump’s incendiary behavior. But those who opposed impeachment objected to the rushed nature of the proceedings and argued that there was little chance the president would be removed from office before the end of his term.“I can think of no action the House can take that is more likely to further divide the American people,” said Tom Cole, a Republican of Oklahoma, who was among the more than 120 House Republicans who voted last week to reject the electoral votes of key swing states that Biden won, despite officials at every level calling November’s vote the most secure election in US history.Democrats were incensed by calls for bipartisanship, particularly from Republicans who refused to recognize Biden’s election victory and voted to overturn the results of a democratic election even after the assault on the Capitol.“It’s a bit much to be hearing that these people would not be trying to destroy our government and kill us if we just weren’t so mean to them,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic Maryland congressman who will serve as the lead impeachment manager.The House proceeded with impeachment on Wednesday after Mike Pence formally rejected calls to strip Trump of power by invoking the 25th amendment to the US constitution, which allows for the removal of a sitting president deemed unfit to perform his job.Pence’s signal came just hours before the House passed a resolution calling on him to take the unprecedented action.Trump’s day of reckoning on Capitol Hill comes less than a year after he was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial for pressuring Ukraine to open investigations into Biden and his son. But with just days left in his presidency, the political landscape had shifted dramatically.As fear turned to fury in the days since the siege, senior Republican leaders signaled both tacitly and explicitly a desire to purge the party of Trump. But their break with president came only after months of tolerating and indulging his campaign of lies about a stolen election, long after it was undeniably clear he had lost.No House Republicans voted in support when Trump was impeached in 2019 over his attempts to persuade the leader of Ukraine to investigate the family of Joe Biden, then his election rival.The swift second impeachment vote comes just one week after the riot in Washington DC – the first occupation of the US Capitol since British troops burned the building during the war of 1812 – and one week before Trump is due to leave office. The formal charge, a single article of impeachment, was drafted as lawmakers were ducking under chairs and praying for safety during the attack. It charges Trump with “inciting violence against the government of the United States’’ by encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol in a last stand to keep him in office by overturning the will of 81 million Americans who voted against him.“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more,” he told the raucous crowd at last Wednesday morning’s gathering near the White House.Rallying behind what they believed was a battle cry from an American president, thousands of loyalists stormed the Capitol in a violent rampage that threatened the lives of lawmakers, congressional staff, journalists and Trump’s own vice-president, who was there to fulfill his constitutional duty to count and certify the electoral college votes.“In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government,” the article states. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of government.”Two Senate Republicans have already called on Trump to resign, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, reportedly believes the president committed impeachable offenses.The House was prepared to immediately transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate after Wednesday’s expected vote to impeach. On Wednesday, McConnell’s office said he would not reconvene the Senate before 19 January, meaning Trump’s impeachment trial would begin during the inaugural days of Biden’s presidency.Though consequences for Trump will not include premature removal from office, the Senate trial would not be entirely symbolic.Two-thirds of the 100-member body are required to convict a president, meaning 17 Republicans would have to join Democrats to find Trump guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.If convicted, it would then only require a simple majority to disqualify him from ever again holding public office. More

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      Are Republicans really ready to unhitch their wagon from Donald Trump?

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterHas the spell really been broken? After years of joining Donald Trump in demonizing political opponents, and holding their silence as Trump furiously shredded public trust in elections, public service, the rule of law and the truth itself, have mainstream Republicans really decided to give him up?Were the deaths of a police officer and four others at the US Capitol last week in a riot incited by Trump the final outrage? Or did the recent loss of two huge elections in Georgia – elections they expected to win – focus their minds?Perhaps the impressive list of US corporations that have suspended political donations until Washington returns to sanity have been persuasive? Or the new polls showing that 74% of Americans strongly disapprove of the riot at the Capitol?The questions arise from reports on Wednesday, initially in the New York Times, that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, privately supports the second impeachment of Trump. McConnell, whose iron grip on the Senate was torn from him suddenly by those Georgia losses, sees an urgent need for the party to purge Trump in the name of its own survival, multiple outlets reported.“McConnell turns on Trump” is a headline that by itself signals that the Republican zeppelin is already on fire – even if it has yet to come apart in the sky.But there are many other signals of important Republican defections from Trump. The third-ranking Republican in the House, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney and no closet liberal, said on Tuesday that she would vote in favor of an impeachment article charging Trump with incitement of insurrection.“There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the constitution,” Cheney said.William Barr, the former attorney general and Trump apparatchik, voiced the same charge last week, accusing Trump of “betrayal of his office”.We’re seeing a fracturing, a breaking, because of the unprecedented situation – the sedition, the violence, the deathMore than 100 Republican party officials and sympathizers have signed a letter calling for Trump’s immediate resignation, the conservative political strategist Mike Murphy said on his podcast.“We’re going to have a civil war now,” Murphy said, referring to the party. “The war is coming.”Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist who left the party because of Trump, echoed that assessment.“We’re at the moment now where we’re seeing a fracturing, a breaking, because of the unprecedented situation – the sedition, the violence, the death,” Schmidt told the Associated Press.But observers who have watched for four years as Republicans happily harvested votes and amassed political victories under Trump – while fiercely defending the president against any whisper of criticism as Trump coerced election tampering from abroad and stoked racist hatred at home – might wonder how it is that the basic political dynamics have suddenly changed, if indeed they have.One simple explanation might follow the money. Republicans were already facing a campaign finance crunch with the death this week of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a fervent Zionist whose estimated $480m in lifetime giving to Republican causes was bookended by the takeover of the US Capitol, one week before his death, by Trump supporters in “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts.Another Republican megadonor and erstwhile Trump backer, Ken Langone, the billionaire founder of Home Depot, expressed revulsion on Wednesday at the Capitol attack.“I feel betrayed. OK?” Langone said on CNBC. “Last Wednesday, if it doesn’t break every American’s heart, something’s wrong. I didn’t sign up for that.”Top US corporations have also signaled their displeasure. A list of dozens of giant companies – from American Express to Amazon, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Blackrock, Google, Facebook, Marriott and Walmart – have suspended political donations in protest of the turbulence Trump has wrought, which is not taken to have been good for business.Similarly, Trump’s lack of interest in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, which has cost upwards of 380,000 American lives, has left most of the US economy idle and fueled unemployment as countries elsewhere have gone back to work with fewer lost lives –and no culture war over facial masking.The explanation for the Republican break from Trump may come down to raw politics. As of November, Trump is a loser, who might have won re-election if only he had not alienated suburban Republican moderates in places like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Omaha.Trump’s future utility on the stump, in helping Republicans recover control of Congress in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, is questionable. In any case he might be deemed too unpredictable to build a long-term party strategy around.Republicans might have noticed that Trump’s base of voters only shows up to vote for him, and not down-ballot or off-year Republican candidates.Or Trump’s political utility might be deemed to have been used up, the politician an empty husk. In this analysis, Republicans have already gotten everything out of Trump they wanted, and the returns at the margin look to be extremely diminishing.Trump stood and smiled next to three supreme court nominees selected by outside conservative groups, and Trump nominated, for hundreds of federal judgeships, whoever conservatives told him to. Trump was foolish enough in his own egotism to believe that the makeover of the US judiciary was something he had done. Similarly, he bragged about the tax cut bill of 2017, thinking it was something he had negotiated.More recently, Trump has been getting in the way of McConnell’s business, and demonstrating his own impotence where Congress is concerned.In a pathetic attempt to bend the Senate leader last month, Trump vowed not to sign a Covid relief bill, demanding larger individual payouts. McConnell did not blink, and Trump backed down. Likewise, Trump’s veto of a defense spending measure was unceremoniously overridden by both houses of Congress.But a Republican break with Trump is hardly complete. Trump retains huge support among the Republican rank-and-file of elected officials, among state legislators and among Republican base voters. Even after blood was spilled in the Capitol over the election lie, 137 Republicans in the House still voted in favor of that lie. Many Republicans vehemently opposed Trump’s second impeachment.Dave Wasserman, the Congress editor at the Cook Political Report, noted that in the 16 hours after Cheney announced she would vote to impeach Trump, only five Republicans had publicly said they would follow her lead.“I’d be surprised if there are a dozen, ultimately,” Wasserman tweeted. “The GOP reality: anti-Trumpism still faces a greater risk of purge than Trumpism.”But secret and not-so-secret motivations remain. At least some of the senators who will vote on whether to convict Trump in his second impeachment are eager to run for president themselves in 2024 – a job made a lot easier without Trump on the field.If, that is, he really is on his way off. More

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      Nancy Pelosi: Trump is a clear and present danger to the nation – video

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      The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives has opened the debate on the article of impeachment against Donald Trump, arguing the president must be removed from office. Describing the storming of the Capitol as a ‘day of fire’, Nancy Pelosi said Trump had incited insurrection
      Trump impeachment – live
      House poised to impeach Trump for a second time following deadly Capitol riot
      Trump impeachment: what you need to know as House moves to a vote More

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      Liz Cheney, No 3 House Republican, will vote to impeach Trump

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      Powerful conservative joins growing number of Republicans seeking accountability for president after Capitol attackLiz Cheney, the third-highest-ranking Republican leader in the House, has said she will vote to impeach the president on Wednesday, as a growing cohort of Republicans back efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable for inciting the attack on the US Capitol last week.In a strongly worded statement released on Tuesday, Cheney, a representative from Wyoming and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, said that Trump had “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack”. Continue reading… More

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      'Totally appropriate': Trump shows no remorse over role in Capitol attack

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAn unrepentant Donald Trump has denied inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol, in an attempt to shift blame Democrats rejected as “despicable”.The president spoke to reporters for the first time since a pro-Trump mob rampaged through the Capitol last week, leaving five people dead. Democrats accuse him of stoking violence and could vote to impeach him on Wednesday.“So if you read my speech – and many people have done it, and I’ve seen it both in the papers and in the media, on television – it’s been analysed, and people thought that what I said was totally appropriate,” Trump insisted at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, ahead of a trip to Texas to tour his border wall.The president then sought to draw an equivalence with last summer’s mostly peaceful protests against racial injustice, falsely referring to them as “riots”. He said: “If you look at what other people have said – politicians at a high level – about the riots during the summer, the horrible riots in Portland and Seattle, in various other places, that was a real problem – what they said.”It was shortly before noon last Wednesday when Trump gave an incendiary speech to a raucous crowd, insisting his election defeat by Joe Biden could be overturned and urging them to march to the Capitol and “fight much harder” against “bad people”.He said: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”Democrats have directly linked the speech, and previous Trump comments, to the carnage that unfolded when rioters, some carrying Confederate flags, fought with police and looted congressional offices. They have demanded Trump be removed or face a historic second impeachment.As he left the White House on Tuesday, Trump said: “The impeachment is really a continuation of the greatest witch-hunt in the history of politics. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. This impeachment is causing tremendous anger and it’s really a terrible thing that they’re doing.”Democrats gave short shrift to Trump’s denial of responsibility. Speaking to reporters in New York, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said: “What Trump did today, blaming others for what he caused, is a pathological technique used by the worst of dictators.“Trump causes the anger, he causes the divisiveness, he foments the violence and blames others for it. That is despicable. The technique Trump is using is used by the worst dictators the globe has ever seen. Donald Trump should not hold office one day longer and what we saw in his statements today is proof positive of that.”Federal investigators are warning of additional potential security threats around the inauguration of Biden next week. NBC News reported that extremists are using Telegram, an encrypted communication app, to urge violence and even share knowledge of how to make guns and bombs.Multiple media outlets also confirmed an ABC News report that the FBI expects armed pro-Trump protests in all 50 state capitals and Washington before inauguration day.Trump’s potential to fuel further unrest is a source of anxiety. Behind the scenes, he has reportedly continued his retreat into paranoia and unreality, repeating in a conversation with the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, the outlandish lie that so-called “antifa” leftwing activists, not his supporters, were responsible for death and destruction inside the Capitol.“It’s not antifa,” McCarthy reportedly replied. “It’s Maga. I know. I was there.” Maga refers to the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again”.The House was due to vote on Tuesday night on a resolution seeking the use of the 25th amendment, which provides for the removal of a president deemed unfit for office. Dependent on the vice-president, Mike Pence, the gambit seemed sure to fail.After days of silence between the pair, Trump and Pence held a “good conversation” at the White House on Monday evening, an unnamed official told Reuters.Some who responded to Trump’s call to storm the Capitol, prompting clashes in which a police officer was killed, a rioter was shot dead and three others died, were caught on video chanting “Hang Mike Pence”.A House vote to impeach Trump on one article, for incitement of insurrection, is expected on Wednesday. The timetable for an ensuing Senate trial is uncertain. If Trump is convicted after he leaves power, the Senate could decide to disqualify him from running for office again.Unlike Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019, a sizable number of Republicans in the House and a handful in the Senate have signaled support. Those lawmakers included Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican. Republicans expect up to 20 GOP lawmakers to vote for impeachment, Punchbowl reported.Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman, told the MSNBC network: “We don’t actually need a lot of evidence here because it’s all out in the open. There’s no dispute Donald Trump gave a speech. No dispute there was an attack on the Capitol. No dispute that multiple people died.”Last week’s huge security failure is under growing scrutiny. The Washington Post said it had obtained an internal FBI document from the day before the attack warning extremists were preparing to commit violence and “war”. The report undermined previous claims that the FBI had no intelligence about an imminent attack.Explanations for why Trump himself could not be reached as the Capitol was attacked continued to emerge. According to the Post, quoting an unnamed close adviser, the president was “hard to reach … because it was live TV”.“If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls,” the adviser said. “If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”Trump’s Tuesday visit to the Texas border town of Alamo, 240 miles south of the historic Alamo fort, was promoted as a way to highlight work on the border wall and seen as a potential effort to change the narrative.News of Trump’s visit was cause for some confusion with the hugely symbolic Alamo fort in San Antonio, a World Heritage Site where fighters for Texan independence were massacred in 1836.Some observers suggested Trump had booked a venue in error, as his campaign apparently and famously did at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a business in Philadelphia, in November. Many were worried by the prospect of Trump’s visit to Texas, one writing: “Remember the Alamo [is] a rallying cry.”The former federal cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs, whom Trump fired for saying the election was secure, told CNN: “This is the equivalent of ignoring that pain in your chest for a couple weeks and then all of a sudden you have a catastrophic heart attack.“We are on the verge of what I fear to be a pretty significant breakdown in democracy and civil society here.” More

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      Republican accuses Harvard of 'caving to the woke left' after school cuts ties

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      A Republican member of Congress claimed on Tuesday to have undergone a “rite of passage and badge of honor” and accused Harvard University of “caving to the woke left”, after she lost an advisory role for perpetuating Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York was removed from a senior advisory committee at Harvard’s school of government after she declined to resign voluntarily, according to Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Harvard Kennedy School.Hundreds of students and alumni called on Harvard to cut ties with Stefanik, a 2006 Harvard graduate, after last week’s violent insurrection at the US Capitol, which Trump incited.Stefanik was among 147 Republicans who went ahead with objections to certifying Joe Biden’s election, even after the attack left five people dead.She condemned the rioters but repeated false claims about “unprecedented voting irregularities” in the presidential election.Until Harvard took action, Stefanik was one of roughly a dozen current and former public servants on a senior advisory committee for the Institute of Politics, a program intended to get undergraduates interested in public service careers.In a statement, Stefanik said: “The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse and ultimately the student experience.”Elmendorf said the decision was not based on political ideology.“Rather, in my assessment, Elise has made public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.”Stefanik, who represents an upstate New York district, was re-elected to a fourth term in November. More