Most Senate Republicans do not want to call any witnesses to the Trump impeachment trial. Many think that position will prevail, and no witnesses will be called. Still, they realize there is the possibility they will have no choice. If four of their GOP colleagues join with the Senate’s 47 Democrats to demand witnesses, then there will be witnesses. At that point, the question will be not whether but who.
There appear to be two lines of thinking among Republicans about which witness, if there were, say, only one, would be best for the Trump defense. Some GOP senators are leaning toward Hunter Biden, while some in the House who have been deeply involved in the impeachment favor calling the whistleblower or the House managers’ leader, Rep. Adam Schiff.
Republican thinking about Hunter Biden began to solidify after Democrats spent much of Thursday dismissing the allegation that Biden’s lucrative paycheck from Ukrainian energy company Burisma had anything to do with actions taken by his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to pressure Ukraine to fire a top prosecutor.
“There is simply no evidence, nothing, nada, in the record to support this baseless allegation,” House manager Rep. Sylvia Garcia told the Senate.
Listening, Republicans sensed that Democrats were opening the door to calling Hunter Biden to testify. “Lots of us were astonished at how central they made the Bidens today,” one Republican senator said Thursday evening.
Another GOP senator, Josh Hawley, told Fox News’s Special Report, “If we call witnesses, I think the House has made it very clear, we’re going to have to call Hunter Biden and probably Joe Biden.”
Yet another Republican, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, told reporters on Thursday that the Senate does not know enough about the facts of the Biden case to accept the Democrats’ assertion that there is nothing to it. “I don’t know how many times it was said by the managers that the Biden conflict of interest allegation has been debunked … [that] there is no scintilla of evidence in terms of conflicts of interest and potential wrongdoing,” Graham said. “When the managers tell me this has been looked at and debunked, [I say] by who? That is becoming relevant because they have talked about it almost 50 times, that the president had no reason to believe that anything improper occurred in the Ukraine with the Bidens, and he was just out to create a political advantage. The fact is that nobody … has done much looking at what happened in the Ukraine with Hunter Biden.”
“Hunter Biden is not only relevant, he is now critical,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said. “That was a very odd strategic decision from the House managers.”
None of that means Republicans would love to call Hunter Biden or his father. They’d rather there be no witnesses at all. As all the Biden talk was happening, another GOP senator said, “At the end of this, we will move to summary judgment. I don’t think we will have witnesses.” But Thursday’s developments do mean there is increasing Republican consensus on the Biden option.
But that is Republicans in the Senate. Among other Republicans, those in the House who were deeply involved in impeachment and immersed in the minutiae of the Trump-Ukraine matter, there is another view. On Thursday, I asked eight House Republicans who they believed the best witness would be. Their answers were quite different than their Senate colleagues.
Five chose the whistleblower. Three chose impeachment leader Rep. Adam Schiff. Even though I gave them the option of picking Hunter Biden as well, only one said he would also pick Biden along with his first pick, the whistleblower.
Part of the problem with calling Hunter Biden, as some of them see it, is the sheer unpredictability of what he would say and where his testimony would take the Senate trial. No lawmaker seeking a quick acquittal of the president would want the trial to veer off in an uncharted direction. But the GOP House members’ answers also reflected a different perspective on the case. Most are deeply suspicious about the origins of the House Democrats’ Trump-Ukraine investigation, and they want the Senate to know about those origins before voting on impeachment.
One lawmaker recited a key line from the Aug. 12, 2019, whistleblower complaint: “In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
Who were those “multiple U.S. Government officials”? the lawmaker asked. Where did they work? Where did they get their knowledge or on what did they base their opinions? What actions did they take? Who else was involved?
Several Republicans noted that during the impeachment proceedings, Schiff and House Intelligence Committee Democrats frantically stopped any questioning that might have hinted at the whistleblower’s identity. Schiff declared off-limits all discussion that might involve the whistleblower’s identity. On multiple occasions, Schiff said that he did not know who the whistleblower was.
Republicans don’t believe that. But even if it’s true, at minimum, someone on Schiff’s staff knew the whistleblower and advised him on filing the complaint, actions that Schiff later tried to cover up.
Now, House Republicans, and many others, are appalled that the Senate might be asked to judge the impeachment case without knowing how it began.
Of course, House Republicans are House Republicans. They don’t have a say in the Senate trial. And if most Senate Republicans get their way, there won’t be any witnesses at all. But, at this point, there is no way to predict what will happen. Republican thinking on witnesses is changing and changing rapidly. It could well change again before the time comes to decide the witness question.
