Trump Acquitted of Two Impeachment Charges in Near Party-Line Vote

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: President Donald Trump is acquitted of both articles of impeachment. Just one senator crossed party lines to vote to convict him. A conversation with Mitt Romney about that decision.

It’s Thursday, February 6.

Mark Leibovich, tell me about these conversations that you’ve been having with Senator Mitt Romney.

Well, Mitt Romney has always fascinated me as kind of a wild card in his political life as a moderate governor of Massachusetts, as a, quote, “severely conservative” presidential candidate in 2012. Then, as a critic of Donald Trump when Donald Trump took over the party. Then, as a potential Donald Trump cabinet member when he talked to him about being secretary of state in 2016. Then, as a Senate candidate, someone who I wouldn’t say embraced Donald Trump, but someone who certainly didn’t push him away. And then as a senator, someone who has been fairly unshy at times about defying Donald Trump, being critical of him.

Right. Somebody who is seen as ideologically malleable. Someone who’s seen as inconsistent.

Correct. And in this impeachment proceeding, he has been the ultimate wild card. No one knew what he was going to do really. People had ideas back and forth. But you never know what you’re going to get with Mitt Romney. So I had been asking his office — and I’m certainly not the only reporter who had been asking — whether I could hang around with him a little bit, whether I could actually go through this process with him. Which I figured was a bit of a long shot because he’s been in such demand. And to my surprise last week, right as we were leading up to the big vote on witnesses, Mitt Romney agreed to sit down with me.

Wow.

We went up to his hideaway office, which was like a kind of —

Hideaway office?

It’s like a remote office. Every senator gets one.

And Mitt Romney’s was filled with M&M’s.

This was like a little break in the proceedings. So we didn’t have a lot of time.

And I was amazed at how open he was about the kinds of things he was thinking about.

And one of the last things he brought up to me was a sense of obligation he felt to the United States Constitution.

So it was very clear that this was weighing on him.

And I got sort of ushered out of his office. And he had to go back to the floor to continue the trial.

We’re walking out. He goes back to the floor. I took a right turn in a hallway. And there was Amy Klobuchar, who was back in Washington for about 36 hours to do her impeachment stuff, taking a break from her presidential campaign. And I said, Senator, can I ask you a few questions about Mitt Romney?

And the name Mitt Romney sort of stopped her in her tracks a little bit.

And she used this as a prompt to talk about John McCain. The very important role that John McCain, the maverick, played in the United States Senate, as someone who could recruit other potentially dissident Republicans to his side and create a counterforce within the prevailing force that is the Republican Party in the Senate.

So she’s raising the specter that Mitt Romney could be a John McCain in this moment, i.e., could buck the party and perhaps even take other Republicans with him in siding with Democrats in impeachment.

Correct. She saw him as someone who was genuinely agonizing, someone who could be a leader and someone that no one really had a grip on at this point.

So after my conversation with Amy Klobuchar, I left the Hill. I said to Romney’s office, I said, I’d love to keep in touch with him. We did not talk about his ultimate decision. He didn’t want to talk about it yet. He made that pretty clear. But also, I wanted to get a window into his decision-making process. And we had about five days until this was all going to come to a head. So to my surprise and delight, they said, come on back on Wednesday morning.

Wow, the day of —

The day of the decision. The day of the final vote.

O.K. So on Wednesday morning, what happens? What do you do?

Wednesday morning, 10:30. I went into Mitt Romney’s office.

I felt myself getting quite nervous, which is interesting because I almost — you always sort of know what you’re going to get in an interview. I just didn’t know how this was going to go. This was a real jump ball. I mean —

You called it a wild card.

It was a wild card. You could call it whatever you want. But I just didn’t know how this was going to go. He looked exactly like he always looks, which is fresh as a daisy. He hadn’t been sleeping. But you couldn’t tell. He looked ready to go. He didn’t look like he was in a mood for any kind of small talk. I wasn’t either.

He said that he would vote yes to convict the president on charges of abuse of power. And he would vote no on the second impeachment article, which is obstruction of Congress.

And as soon as he started talking, I could see the emotion in his face. I could hear him, not choke up, but certainly there was a strain in his voice that I had not heard before.

He said, basically, I think he’d gone back and forth.

What was interesting to me — and this is one of those things that doesn’t pick up so much on tape — but you see his facial expressions. I mean, Mitt Romney is a very smooth character in his own ways. His face got red. He had a bit of dread in his eyes. It was as if he knew that a chandelier was about to drop on his head.

Wow.

Why do you think Mitt Romney did this interview with you? I mean, he could have decided to show up and vote to convict the president. Why sit down with The New York Times and talk about all the agony and explain himself?

Well, I mean, one thing I’ve always been interested in with Mitt Romney is that he has always been, not in a self-absorbed way, but he’s always been very aware of his own political narrative. He has been aware of how he was viewed, maybe as a political opportunist. Him maybe doing things out of expediency rather than principle. And I think ultimately, one of the things that this Senate chapter has done for him and his career is it has enabled him to maybe rewrite the ending. Maybe recast himself as someone who did feel as if he was doing the right thing at the expense of whatever the expedient decision at the moment would have been.

I think history is important to Mitt Romney. It’s important to him for a lot of reasons. I mean, part of it is his ego. I mean, people in the U.S. Senate want to think that everything they do is actually relevant to history. But I think when you’re Mitt Romney — when you’ve lived a lot of history, when you’ve been the nominee of a Republican Party, when you’ve run twice for president and lost, when you’ve held a number of offices — things like how you make a decision that will mark you forever are important in the historical context. And you could argue, you could be a cynic and say, oh, well, they’re just full of themselves, they care about how history will view them. Who does that? But I actually think it was important and a very kind of formative part of the process of coming to this decision for Mitt Romney.

Was to just talk about it.

Was just to talk about it.

As you were leaving the office, he’s just told you what he’s going to do. What are you thinking?

Well, I mean, part of it is just pure, straight-ahead, opportunistic reporter think, which is God, I hope they don’t call me and say he changed his mind. Because, you know, he’s going to go on the floor in a few hours and shock the world. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it. But this is a very momentous decision that would be a major headline at the end of a process that people had assumed was over, right? I mean, it wasn’t a major twist. But it was certainly a twist in something that would be remembered here.

But beyond your own journalistic —

Beyond my own —

— self-absorption.

— self-absorption. My thought was, I hope he knows what he is in for.

We’ll be right back.

So Mark, what happens after your interview with Romney on Wednesday morning?

O.K. So Wednesday morning becomes Wednesday afternoon. It was probably about 12:20 p.m. in Washington. I walked out of the office. I headed back to the New York Times, Washington bureau. And I knew he was scheduled to speak at 2 o’clock. And he took the mic.

And of course, you want to actually be watching this because, one, you don’t know if what you just learned is going to hold, whether he changed his mind or not.

But the other thing is, how does this look and feel when he’s actually delivering it to the world? And one of things I was struck by is that he looked really nervous. He looked a lot more nervous on the floor than he did with me.

And he got emotional at a couple of points.

And it took him a while to get through this.

Yeah, I was watching it. He was flipping the pages —

Absolutely, yeah.

— and speaking with all sorts of pregnant pauses.

Absolutely, yeah. And I don’t think he was doing that for any kind of dramatic reason. I think it was just a genuinely hard speech to get through. And at the end of the speech, Mitt Romney invoked his children and his grandchildren.

This is something he does fairly regularly. But it also, you know he’s playing for keeps here.

But I think maybe there’s some false modesty at work here too. I mean, he’s not a footnote. He is a dissenting voice. And the Republican Party has not had many of those at all through this process.

And then he walked off into history.

So, Mark, after Romney’s speech, the full Senate formally reconvenes.

And becomes a court of impeachment.

So what happens?

Chief Justice John Roberts gives final instructions to the jury, or the U.S. Senate. The formal articles of impeachment are read aloud.

And he calls a vote.

On the first article of impeachment, presidential abuse of power —

Mitt Romney votes guilty. He votes to convict.

On the first article of impeachment, abuse of presidential power, the president was acquitted by a final count of 52 noes, 48 yeses.

On the second article of impeachment, which is obstruction of Congress, Mitt Romney voted to acquit the president. The president was acquitted by 53 noes and 47 yeses.

And in the end, Mitt Romney was the only U.S. senator, and the first senator in U.S. history, to vote to convict a president of his own party of an impeachable offense.

You could have hinted at this, Mark. But there is something really intriguing about choosing this moment for Mitt Romney to take a stand. His career — I covered it very closely, covered 2012 campaign — is littered with examples of moments where it seemed he wanted to be on both sides of an issue. Or he evolved in ways that felt opportunistic. Yet, at this moment, he becomes a senator of conscience. And he’s not malleable. But it’s a moment where his vote to convict the president on one of two counts has no impact whatsoever on the process. And when you think back to people like John McCain, as Senator Amy Klobuchar did, he stood for conscience at moments that had huge consequence.

The decisive vote in the Affordable Care Act.

Was the deciding vote on Affordable Care Act, for example. In this case, Romney is the lone dissenting voice in a case that he can have no influence over. So what do you make of that?

Here’s why that’s important. One, Donald Trump has craved some kind of way to say this is just a partisan witch hunt. Every Republican voted to support me. This denies him that opportunity. The other part in the context of Mitt Romney’s career is, again, as you mentioned, this is not something Mitt Romney has traditionally done. Now you could argue the counter-factual. If he was up for re-election in Utah next year, would he vote differently? If he was thinking about running for president and going for the Republican nomination in 2020, would he vote differently? I think at this point, he has lived a long career. He has had a long, long life. And he would say at this point that he is answering to different forces.

Regardless of whether it changes any of the dynamics of this Congress and the Republican Party and this president?

Yeah, I don’t think it will change any dynamics at all, except that Mitt Romney’s life is going to get a lot more uncomfortable for reasons that I think he can handle, given how he weighed this decision.

Well to that point, what has been the reaction for Romney in the hours since he went on the floor, gave that speech and then cast a vote to convict the president?

I would say quite unpleasant.

Everything from the president of the United States’s son Don Jr. calling for his expulsion from the Senate. His own niece Romney McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, publicly rebuking him basically on Twitter.

His own niece?

His own niece, yes, calls for recall elections in Utah. Things like that. Now this is a window into the kinds of things that are in store for someone who dissents from President Trump.

And maybe what his colleagues in the Senate deliberately avoided by not —

Absolutely.

— doing what he did.

It is a faith that they have voted to avoid. I mean, it’s obviously — there are a lot of things at work when you decide to make a vote like this. But the noise is an absolutely undeniable part of the experience of voting against the interests of the person who leads your party. Donald Trump.

Thank you, Mark.

Thank you, Michael.

On Tuesday night, President Trump himself began attacking Mitt Romney on Twitter, promoting a video that calls Romney slippery and stealthy, and without any evidence, claims that Romney is, quote, “a secret asset of the Democratic Party.”

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, Democratic officials in Iowa released more results from Monday’s caucuses, which left the position of the candidates unchanged and the final outcome of the vote uncertain. With 97 percent of the results in, Pete Buttigieg maintained a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders that verged on a tie. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire —

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who stands at a distant fourth place in Iowa, attacked both Sanders and Buttigieg as flawed candidates for the Democratic nomination.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.