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QINGDAO TODAY
在线翻译:
szdaily -> World -> 
US president acquitted of two impeachment charges
    2020-02-07  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

AFTER five months of hearings, investigations and revelations about U.S. President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, a divided United States Senate acquitted him Wednesday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress to aid his own re-election, bringing an acrimonious impeachment trial to its expected end.

In a pair of votes whose outcome was never in doubt, the Senate fell well short of the two-thirds margin that would have been needed to remove the 45th president. The verdicts came down — after three weeks of debate — almost entirely along party lines, with every Democrat voting “guilty” on both charges and Republicans uniformly voting “not guilty” on the obstruction of Congress charge.

Only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with his party to judge Trump guilty of abuse of power.

It was the third impeachment trial of a president and the third acquittal in American history, and it ended the way it began: with Republicans and Democrats at odds. They disagreed over Trump’s conduct and his fitness for office, even as some members of his own party conceded the basic allegations that undergirded the charges, that he sought to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals.

But in a sign of the widening partisan divide testing the country and its institutions, the verdict did not promise finality, which members of both parties conceded would come only after the November election.

The president himself did not directly address his acquittal, but shortly afterward, he announced on Twitter that he would make a public statement the next day at the White House about what he called “our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax.”

He then tweeted an attack ad against Romney that called the senator a “Democrat secret asset.”

Democratic leaders immediately insisted the result was illegitimate, the product of a self-interested cover-up by Republicans, and promised to continue their investigations of Trump.

“The verdict of this kangaroo court will be meaningless,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said moments before the vote. “By refusing the facts — by refusing witnesses and documents — the Republican majority has placed a giant asterisk, the asterisk of a sham trial, next to the acquittal of President Trump, written in permanent ink.”

The president’s Republican allies excoriated Democrats for a proceeding they said had damaged the country and its institutions in the name of saving them.(SD-Agencies)

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