NOW: The impeachment managers are giving a press conference after Trump's acquittal.
RASKIN says that McConnell's comments after the vote went even further than Democrats by suggesting Trump could be criminally charged.
PLASKETT says seeking key witnesses would have taken months of litigation. She notes they're still in court for testimony for MCGAHN from 2019.
PELOSI on Rs who voted to acquit:
“Maybe they can’t get [another] job ... What is so important about any one of us. What is so important about the political survival of any one of us than the constitution we have sworn to protect and defend."
PELOSI on censure: "We censure people for using stationery for the wrong purpose. We don’t censure people for inciting insurrection.”
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The vote will be the first time since 1868 that a majority of the Senate (though not a supermajority) votes to convict. And it will easily set a record for most votes to convict by members of the president's party. politico.com/news/2021/02/1…
Most of the energy has been for speeding straight through to the final vote. But evidence that Trump attacked Pence while *knowing* he was fleeing the violence has changed the calculus.
Some Rs have signaled they're intensely interested in this as well.
@HerreraBeutler Tonight, Herrera Beutler makes clear she has been emphatic with her colleagues on this point and pleads with others close to Trump — and Pence himself — to start saying what they know.
NEWS: Tuberville speaks to reporters just now and stands by account he gave to @burgessev on Wednesday
"I said Mr President, they've taken the vice president out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go ... probably the only guy in the world hung up on pres United States"
@burgessev Trump's lawyers dismissed it as "hearsay" during the trial today. It's a key point that several Republicans considering conviction asked about and got no answer from Trump's team.
@burgessev More importantly: If Tuberville's account is true, it means Trump attacked Pence on Twitter about 10 minutes after learning Pence had been evacuated to escape the violent mob.
@burgessev The Trump team's response to this ignores what Castro just said to indicate there's "nothing in the record" about what Trump knew about Pence.
@burgessev This trial appears to be speeding to a resolution without witnesses, but that exchange screams out for Tuberville's testimony. He could easily confirm whether what he told @burgessev on Wednesday was accurate: that he informed Trump about Pence's evacuation.
"There was no insurrection," is an astonishing argument to make for what was obvously an insurrection, and has been described that way by senators and the Justice Department for weeks.
For exmaple, here's a DOJ filing in the Q shaman case last week describing the "insurrection."
CASTOR suggests he was the first person to raise Trump's 2:38 pm tweet calling on protesters to "stay peaceful."
He's wrong. The House managers dissected this tweet and said Trump's exhortation to "stay peaceful" was absurd since the violence was already underway.