When Donald Trump was impeached for the second time, it was for his ongoing efforts to overthrow the 2020 election and stage the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Republicans, including McConnell, gave a lot of reasons for why Trump should not be impeached, and that is now coming back to bite him — according to one legal expert
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that McConnel's comments were cited by the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Trump's "presidential immunity" case.
"They also talk about the fact that Mitch McConnell and others famously, during President Trump's second impeachment, said that the answer wasn't a political solution but was indeed the court's and the justice system's to answer for. And that was an excuse at the time that has come back to bite the former president in his posterior."
After failing to be impeached, Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-K.Y.) said on the floor that rioters had been “fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth. Because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
“Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” continued McConnell. “Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
But he then claimed that they shouldn't be handled by a political process, saying “impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice." Instead, he suggested Trump could be criminally prosecuted in the future.
“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,” he said.
"Importantly, by the time the United States Senate conducted a trial on the article of impeachment, he had become former President Trump," the court writes in the decision. "At the close of the trial, on February 13, 2021, fifty-seven Senators voted to convict him, and forty-three voted to acquit him. ... Because two-thirds of the Senate did not vote for conviction, he was acquitted on the article of impeachment."
Later in the ruling, the court cited Trump's own impeachment lawyer from Feb. 9, 2021, in which he claimed, "'investigation, prosecution, and punishment" is "the article III courts," as "[w]e have a judicial process" and "an investigative process . . . to which no former officeholder is immune."
He continues: “[T]he text of the Constitution . . . makes very clear that a former President is subject to criminal sanction after his Presidency for any illegal acts he commits.”
Then the appeals court threw it back in Trump's face.
See Rubin's analysis below or at the link here.