Trump tweets a video implying he'll be president '4eva' as his first official response after impeachment trial acquittal
- President Donald Trump tweeted a video showing him as president '4eva' in response to the US Senate voting to acquit him on charges of abusing his power and obstructing Congress after a two-week-long trial.
- The Senate voted 52-48 to acquit Trump on the abuse of power charge and 53-47 on the obstruction charge, wrapping up a whirlwind four-month-long impeachment process that began in September 2019.
- Notably, one Republican Senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, took the extraordinary step of breaking with his party in voting to convict Trump on one articles, blindsiding Trump and the rest of the Republican party.
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President Donald Trump tweeted a video trolling Democrat that he would be "president 4eva" as his first official response to the US Senate formally voting to acquit him on charges of abusing his power and obstructing Congress after a two-week-long trial.
On February 5, the Senate voted 52-48 to acquit Trump on the abuse of power charge and 53-47 on the obstruction charge, wrapping up a whirlwind four-month-long impeachment process that began in September 2019.
The expected acquittal vote came after a highly contentious debate and vote over whether to call witnesses failed 49-51 on January 31, effectively ending the trial and making it the first Senate impeachment trial to feature no witness testimony.
The video, which Trump has tweeted before, is a video montage adaptation of a 2018 Time Magazine cover jokingly showing him as president for the next several centuries.
Notably, one Republican Senator, Mitt Romney of Utah took the extraordinary step of breaking with his party in voting to convict Trump on the abuse of power charge, blindsiding Trump and the rest of the Republican party.
The acquittal was the culmination of an impeachment inquiry that began in early September when an anonymous whistleblower complaint lodged by a member of the intelligence community said that in a series of events culminating in a July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump used "the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."
The complaint detailed concerns that Trump, days after withholding a nearly $400 million military-aid package, used the call with Zelensky to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian oil-and-gas company, from 2014 to 2019. Trump and his allies have, without evidence, accused Biden of using his power as vice president to urge Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma in order to protect Hunter.
Over the course of the House's impeachment inquiry, the whistleblower's complaint has been corroborated by the White House's summary notes of the July 25 call, White House officials themselves, and the sworn testimony of several career diplomatic and national-security officials.
Multiple diplomats and other officials testified under oath that the Trump administration explicitly conditioned lifting the hold of the military aid to Ukraine on Zelensky publicly announcing investigations into Burisma and a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to benefit Hillary Clinton.