Romney reached out to the WH requesting affidavits
A reluctant Romney tried to give Trump an out on impeachment. The White House wouldn’t take it.
THE BIG IDEA: Mitt Romney wants you to know that voting to remove President Trump from office on an abuse-of-power charge was “the most difficult decision” he’s ever made.
As he became the first senator in U.S. history to vote for removing a president of his own party from office, even though he knew it wouldn’t change the outcome, the GOP’s 2012 standard-bearer emphasized his reluctance to do so and highlighted the off-ramps he sought.
Romney revealed that he contacted the White House counsel’s office, through a fellow senator, asking if it would provide sworn affidavits from officials such as former national security adviser John Bolton or acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, but it was to no avail.
“I sought to hear testimony from John Bolton not only because I believed he could add context to the charges, but also because I hoped that what he said might raise reasonable doubt and thus remove from me the awful obligation to vote for impeachment,” Romney said in an emotional speech on the Senate floor.
The 1975 graduate of Harvard Law School said he also hoped Trump’s defense team would persuade him to acquit the president during the trial. He found their arguments that a president can only be impeached for violating a specific statute “absurd on its face.”
Check out The Daily 202 from @PowerPost https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/02/06/daily-202-a-reluctant-romney-tried-to-give-trump-an-out-on-impeachment-the-white-house-wouldn-t-take-it/5e3b7d2188e0fa7f82545cc6/
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