Mary Calvert/Reuters
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Friday said he'll vote "yes" to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
- Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced Wednesday that he will vote to convict President Donald Trump following a brutal impeachment trial in the Senate.
- Manchin's announcement shattered Trump's hope for a bipartisan acquittal after he was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
- "The evidence presented by the House Managers, including video testimony of witnesses under oath in the House of Representatives, clearly supports the charges brought against the President in the articles of impeachment," Manchin said in a statement.
- Earlier this week, Manchin called for the Senate to censure Trump for his dealings with Ukraine, but the motion failed to gain traction.
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Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced Wednesday that he will vote to convict President Donald Trump following a brutal impeachment trial in the Senate.
"The evidence presented by the House Managers, including video testimony of witnesses under oath in the House of Representatives, clearly supports the charges brought against the President in the articles of impeachment," Manchin said in a statement.
He added: "Despite the false claim that a President can do no wrong, the President is not entitled to act with blatant disregard for an equal branch of government or use the superpower status of the United States to condition our support of democracy and our allies on any political favor. This is not who we are as a country."
Manchin's announcement shattered Trump's hope for a bipartisan acquittal after he was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The announcement came after Manchin motioned on Monday for the Senate to censure Trump over his actions, but the move failed to gain traction.
Manchin, a Democratic senator who represents a deep-red state, is widely viewed as a swing vote in the upper chamber and is known to be friendly with the president.
The Washington Post reported last month that the White House has been courting Manchin as it looked for at least one Senate Democrat to vote against convicting Trump and removing him from office.
Both articles of impeachment against the president relate to his efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election while withholding $391 million in vital military aid and dangling a White House meeting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately sought and still hasn't gotten.
At the center of the impeachment inquiry was a July 25 phone call during which Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, over the latter's employment on the board of the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings.
Trump also asked Zelensky to help discredit the Russia probe by investigating a bogus conspiracy theory suggesting Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help Democrats and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Documents and testimony from more than a dozen witnesses eventually revealed that the July phone conversation was just one data point in a months-long effort by Trump and his allies, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to leverage the weight of the US government and foreign policy to force Ukraine into acceding to his political demands.
Wednesday's vote to acquit the president came after a heated trial in which the Republican-controlled Senate refused to subpoena documents or hear new witness testimony.
The move was unprecendented - the Senate called witnesses in all 15 impeachment trials in US history, including those of former Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
Senate Republicans' decision to block witnesses was especially noteworthy given that John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, announced he was willing to testify and had firsthand knowledge of the president's pressure campaign in Ukraine.
House impeachment managers argued that the Senate had a constitutional obligation to hear new witness testimony, particularly from someone like Bolton who, as the former national security adviser, was the most high profile individual in Trump's inner circle to allege wrongdoing on the president's part.
Trump's defense lawyers, meanwhile, argued that the Senate already had enough testimony from the 17 witnesses who testified in the House impeachment hearings and didn't need any more information. This argument was at odds, however, with the defense team's claim that the House rushed through impeachment proceedings without allowing for more witnesses.
Ultimately, 51 senators, all Republican, voted against calling new witnesses, and 49 senators voted in favor of it. Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, voted with Democrats to call witnesses.