The Republican party demonstrated its contempt for the Constitution and American people on Friday when it voted 51 to 49 to disallow witnesses to testify in Donald Trump's impeachment trial.
This means any slim hope of making Trump the first president to be removed from office via impeachment is effectively dashed.
The Republican cover-up is putting the nation on the path to dictatorship.
Late last week, it took another more perfidious turn.
Mere hours after the Senate's vote, a court filing confirmed the Justice Department (DOJ) is withholding two dozen emails pertaining to Trump's role in freezing military aid to Ukraine.
The filing comes in response to a Center for Public Integrity lawsuit seeking to release the unredacted emails after receiving aggressively redacted ones in December.
Citing "presidential privilege," Heather Walsh, a White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) lawyer, told the court the emails "reflect communications by either the President, the Vice President, or the President's immediate advisers regarding Presidential decision-making about the scope, duration, and purpose of the hold on military assistance to Ukraine."
By withholding Ukraine assistance, the OMB broke the law, according to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).
According to CNN:
"The filing, released near midnight Friday, marks the first official acknowledgment from the Trump administration that emails about the President's thinking related to the aid exist, and that he was directly involved in asking about and deciding on the aid as early as June. The administration is still blocking those emails from the public and has successfully kept them from Congress.
This is, by definition, a cover up.
Every previous impeachment proceeding, from president to judge, included witnesses.
Senate impeachment trials
(Image by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)) Details DMCA
After Friday's Senate vote, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer commented:
"America will remember this daya day when the United States Senate did not live up to its responsibilities, turned away from truth and instead went along with a sham trial."
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