BY ANNA KANE ’20
President Donald Trump was acquitted of impeachment in the late afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 5 after a three-week-long trial in the Senate. Trump had been charged with abuse of power and obstruction of justice over his dealings with Ukraine.
In September, news broke via a whistleblower complaint that Trump had asked the president-elect of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Hunter Biden, who served as board member of a Ukrainian natural gas company. It later broke that Trump, along with his advisors and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, undertook a concerted pressure campaign on Ukraine and withheld $391 billion in U.S. security assistance for the country. The actions were allegedly an attempt to aid his re-election in November.
In December, the House voted to impeach Trump, but waited until Jan. 10 to hand over the articles of impeachment to the Senate. The trial lasted just 20 days, making it the shortest of any impeachment trial in United States history.
At the conclusion of the trial, 67 votes were needed per article in order to convict Trump. Forty-eight senators supported a guilty verdict and 52 supported a not guilty verdict for the first article, abuse of power. The second article, obstruction of justice, garnered 47 guilty votes to 53 not guilty.
Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was the only senator to cross party lines, and voted to convict Trump of the abuse of power charge. Romney is the first-ever senator to vote to remove a president of his own party. Insisting that the trial was illegitimate because witnesses were blocked from testifying, Democrats have promised to continue investigating Trump.
The impeachment trials of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton — the only other impeachment trials in United States history — also ended in acquittal.