Dem Sen. Murphy: Trump ‘Trying to Shake Down’ the Senate on Witnesses

During MSNBC’s coverage of the Senate’s impeachment trial on Monday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) weighed in on a potential witness swap in the Senate’s impeachment trial by stating that President Trump is “trying to shake down the United States Senate to get us to engage in an exercise that would help him destroy his political rivals.”

Murphy said the idea of a witness swap “has been floating around in various forms for a few days. And frankly, the performance of the president’s lawyers today make[s] me even more resistant to that kind of trade. Because the president’s lawyers have made it really clear, they just want to turn the Senate floor into a mechanism for the president to be able to continue to destroy his political opponents. The entire scandal is over the president using the official organs of the federal government to try to destroy a political opponent. And now, they want to use the organs of the United States Senate to do the same thing. We can’t be a party to that. That’s exactly what this impeachment scandal is over, and we would be perpetuating the crime if we engaged in that same kind of behavior in the Senate.”

He added, “Listen, the president is now trying to shake down the United States Senate to get us to engage in an exercise that would help him destroy his political rivals. What he and his allies are saying is that if you want fact witnesses, the most important witnesses, who have volunteered to you that they have dispositive evidence of the president’s crime, if you want them to testify, then you’ve got to help me continue to destroy the Bidens. We can’t engage in that kind of exercise. That’s exactly what this whole thing is about.”

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