McConnell may Convict Trump as GOP Elite Lobby Him on Impeachment Charges

Via American Action News: 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is considering voting to convict former President Donald Trump on charges of inciting an insurrection as Republican elites quietly lobby Congress to disqualify Trump from running again in 2024, CNN reports.

“Mitch said to me he wants Trump gone,” CNN claims it was told by an anonymous Republican member of Congress. “It is in his political interest to have him gone. It is in the GOP interest to have him gone. The question is, do we get there?”

The Democrat-majority House has already indicted Trump on an impeachment charge of inciting the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which disrupted the ceremonial counting of states’ electoral votes.

But actually convicting Trump on the impeachment charge and disqualifying him from again holding a federal office requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which is evenly split between 50 Republicans and a caucus of 48 Democrats and two Democrat-aligned independents.

That means 17 Republicans would need to vote to convict Trump, a tall order when doing so means facing a strong challenge in a Republican primary.

If McConnell were to vote to convict, it could convince wavering Republicans to join him, which has top Republican influencers quietly lobbying him to pull the trigger.

CNN reports:

The lobbying effort has included behind-the-scenes pressure by Republican donors, calls from former top Trump White House officials, and a set of talking points circulating among Republicans arguing for Trump’s impeachment.

The 9-point memo charges that “it is difficult to find a more anti-conservative outburst by a U.S. president than Donald Trump the last two months.” Other points include that Trump “urged supporters from across the nation to come to Washington, DC, to disrupt” Congress on January 6 and egged on the crowd, which was “widely understood to include people who were planning to fight physically, and who were prepared to die in response to his false claims of a ‘stolen election.”

The memo goes on to point out Trump “tweeted and made other statements against the Vice President as the Secret Service was being forced to rush Mike Pence out of the Senate chamber and into a protective bunker.” It’s unclear how widely disseminated the memo is among Republicans in Washington.