The Senate voted 52-48 to acquit the second article of impeachment on obstruction. CNBC's Ylan Mui reports.
President Donald Trump on Thursday celebrated his impeachment acquittal by excoriating Democrats and Mitt Romney, the only GOP senator to vote to remove him from office.
Trump, who was given a standing ovation and whooping cheers when he entered the White House East Room filled with Republican supporters, gave a free-form speech that ran more than an hour. During the largely ad-libbed talk, he also relived some of his well-trodden grievances, including the Russia probe and the 2016 election.
“It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops, it was leakers and liars,” Trump said, claiming he had been targeted since the day he announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015.
House Speaker “Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person,” Trump said, calling both Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff “vicious.”
“Had I not fired [former FBI director] James Comey, who was a disaster by the way, it’s possible I wouldn’t even be standing here right now,” he added. Comey’s firing in the spring of 2017 triggered the Justice Department’s appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
“It was all bullshit,” Trump said. “It was hell.”
The Senate on Wednesday voted to acquit Trump of both counts in his impeachment trial: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The vote was the final step in a two-week trial marked by impassioned arguments from House Democrats that Trump was a danger to the nation, and stalwart support from Senate Republicans for a president who maintains a political stranglehold on their party.
Impeachment rules require 67 votes in the Senate to convict a president and remove him from office. With a 53-47 Republican majority, the odds that Trump would be convicted were slim from the start.
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