McConnell rejects Schumer’s opening offer on impeachment trial

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed back strongly against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s request to simultaneously agree to witnesses and the parameters of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, calling it a “strange request” that breaks with recent impeachment precedent.

“It is not the Senate’s job to leap into the breach and search desperately for ways to get to ‘guilty,’” McConnell said, a reply to Schumer’s request that the Senate agree to call several Trump administration officials as witnesses for the trial in the same resolution that lays out the impeachment trial’s rules of the road.