Senate Impeachment Trial Schedule Announced (Sekulow Recap)

We have a date for when the U.S. Senate will take up the impeachment trial of former President and private citizen Donald J. Trump.

Today on Sekulow, we discussed the fact that we now have a date for the start of the Senate impeachment trial. They are moving ahead with the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

The trial start remained up in the air until Senators Schumer and McConnell came to an agreement as to when the impeachment trial will begin and when they will receive the impeachment article.

We now know the ceremonial act of the House impeachment managers walking over the article will happen today. Those House impeachment managers are: Representatives Jamie Raskin, Diana DeGette, David Cicilline, Joaquin Castro, Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu, Joe Neguse, Madeleine Dean, and non-voting Delegate Stacy Plaskett of the Virgin Islands.

Then tomorrow the Senators will be sworn in as jurors. That said, the actual trial is still more than two weeks away. They’ve agreed that they will not start the trial until February 9th.  Plenty of questions remain. We do not know the trial schedule yet. We don’t know how long they’ll be allowed to speak or how long the Senators will have to question both the House impeachment managers and President Trump’s legal team. We don’t know if they’ll hold the trial over half day periods either.

So we’re looking at a two week and one day buildup to the trial, with a question over who is going to preside over the trial. It’s looking less likely that it will be Chief Justice John Roberts. It is a mostly ceremonial role, if they follow the model demonstrated by Chief Justice Roberts in the last impeachment trial. The presiding officer reads the questions from the Senators to the parties. That’s really the most important part of that role. That means it could even be someone like Vice President Harris or the Senate Pro Tempore, Pat Leahy.

My dad, Jay Sekulow, elaborated on how this situation is different than the last impeachment:

I think it is going to look a lot different than what we did a year ago, what we were doing a year ago this week. Because we had multiple counts, with complicated separation of powers arguments and complicated constitutional issues. Now, they’ve got a big constitutional issue here at the front, of course, which is the idea of impeaching a President who’s already removed from office.

As we explained last week:

In the days ahead, we will be analyzing the proceedings and keeping you up to date as the impeachment trial begins. Our team has more experience than anyone in the United States with impeachment proceedings.

The full broadcast is complete with much more discussion and analysis by our team about this upcoming impeachment trial of now former President Trump.

Watch the full broadcast below.