Almost two months after articles of impeachment were brought against him, President Donald Trump was acquitted on Wednesday of both charges.
The Senate voted almost exactly down party lines to acquit Trump on the first charge — abuse of power — with 52 senators (all Republicans) voting not guilty, and 48 voting guilty.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was the only Republican to vote against the president on that charge; he is also the first senator in U.S. history to vote to remove a president that belongs to his party.
“I believe that attempting to corrupt an election to maintain power is about as egregious an assault on the Constitution as can be made,” Romney said on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “And for that reason, it is a high crime and misdemeanor, and I have no choice under the oath that I took but to express that conclusion.”
On article two of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, the vote was divided 53 to 47 in Trump’s favor.
The charges brought against Trump — who became the third U.S. president in history to be impeached, after the House voted against him in December — accuse him of withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former U.S. vice president and 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden, along with his son, Hunter.
Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, said in a statement on Wednesday that Trump was “totally vindicated” by the Senate’s vote, adding it’s “time to get back to the business of the American people.”
“The do-nothing Democrats know they can’t beat him, so they had to impeach him … And since the President’s campaign only got bigger and stronger as a result of this nonsense, this impeachment hoax will go down as the worst miscalculation in American political history.”
Democrats were just as quick to voice their disagreement with the vote; 2020 presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted that it “is a shameful day for the US Senate, a somber day for the US Constitution, & a sad day for the United States of America.”