Chuck Schumer wants ‘impartial’ impeachment trial for Trump but didn’t want one for Clinton: Report

AP Photo/Frank Franklin II

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer took a hit in the liberal media Friday when CNN reported the New York Democrat argued repeatedly during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s that the Senate wasn’t an impartial “jury box.”

Mr. Schumer has criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in recent days for describing himself as “not an impartial juror” in advance of President Trump’s impeachment trial.

“That is an astonishing admission of partisanship,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor of his Republican counterpart.

But Mr. Schumer campaigned for the Senate in 1998 on a pledge not to impeach or convict Mr. Clinton, CNN noted, and he gave several television interviews in 1998 and 1999 in which he described the Senate as “quite different from a jury” during impeachment trials.

“We have a pre-opinion,” Mr. Schumer said on “Larry King Live” in January 1999, referring to himself and two newly elected Republican senators who had voted on impeachment as House members in 1998 and planned to vote in Mr. Clinton’s Senate trial. “This is not a criminal trial, but this is something that the Founding Fathers decided to put in a body that was susceptible to the whims of politics.”

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