JAKARTA - The majority of the United States Senate (US) on Tuesday, February 9 local time, chose to hold the full impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. The Senate supports the Democrats' argument that trials are permitted under the US Constitution.
US senators voted to continue Donald Trump's impeachment trial on charges of inciting the deadly attack on the Capitol, dismissing claims that the trial was unconstitutional after viewing a graphic video of the January attacks.
The Senate voted 56-44 to continue its trial of the former president, a first in history, rejecting a large part of the party line of his lawyers' argument that a president cannot face trial after leaving the White House.
The video presented by the team of nine Democratic House of Representatives intersperses images of the January 6 Capitol violence with clips of Trump's incendiary speech to a crowd of supporters moments earlier urging them to "fight tooth and nail" to reverse their defeat in the November 3 election.
The senator, who served on the jury, watched as screens showed Trump's followers dropping barriers and hitting police officers on the Capitol. The video also contains the moment when police guarding the room of the House of Representative shot dead protester Ashli Babbitt, one of five people including a police officer who died in the rampage.
"If it is not an impeachment offense, then there is no such thing," said Democrat Jamie Raskin, who is leading the prosecution.
He bursts into tears as he recounted how the relatives he brought to the Capitol that day to witness election certification had to take shelter in an office near the floor of the US House of Representatives.
In contrast to Democrats' emotional presentations, Trump's lawyers attacked the process, arguing that it was an unconstitutional partisan attempt to seal off Trump's political future, even after he had left the White House.
"What they really want to achieve here in the name of the Constitution is, to prohibit Donald Trump from running again for political office, but this is an insult to the Constitution no matter who they are targeting today," said David Schoen, one of Trump's lawyers.
The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language. (system supported by DigitalSiber.id)
