'We Are F**KED’: New Book Reveals How GOP Senators Bailed Out Trump During 1st Impeachment Trial

Republican senators were more deeply involved in orchestrating President Donald Trump’s defense in his first impeachment trial than previously known, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book shared exclusively with HuffPost.

In “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump,” due out Oct. 18, Politico’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian offer a behind-the-scenes look at the two failed efforts to remove Trump from political power.

The first attempt, which began in 2019 and culminated in an early-2020 Senate trial, dealt with Trump’s withholding of aid to Ukraine on the condition that the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The House impeached Trump, accusing him of abuse of power. However, the GOP-controlled Senate cleared Trump with only one Republican dissenter: Senator Mitt Romney of Utah.

Trump and his defense team maintained he did nothing wrong throughout the January 2020 trial and that no “quid pro quo” had taken place, even though he was caught on tape telling Zelenskyy to “do us a favor” by launching a probe of Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

A former law professor Alan Dershowitz was a Trump lawyer. He argued before the entire Senate , that Trump could do whatever he wanted in order to win reelection. This is a broad claim of executive power.

The outlandish line of defense alarmed a number of Republican senators who sat in the chamber for weeks as “jurors” in the impeachment trial, according to “Unchecked.”

Sen. Roy Blunt (R.Mo. told Trump’s team afterward to fire Dershowitz on the spot, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned them to switch tactics.

“Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” Cruz reportedly said at one point, contradicting what Republicans were saying publicly about the charges at the time.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also fumed at Trump’s legal team after they fumbled responding to a senator’s question about calling new witnesses. Trump’s attorneys said that it was simply too late to do so, a line Graham worried would lose Republican votes.

“We are FUCKED. We are FUCKED!” Graham, a top Trump ally, reportedly said afterward as he walked into the GOP cloakroom, a private chamber adjacent to the Senate floor.

Publicly, many GOP senators resisted commenting on the proceedings. They claimed that it would be inappropriate to do so because they are required to remain neutral as jurors. But privately, the ineptitude of Trump’s legal team forced them to take matters into their own hands, Bade and Demirjian report.

Their goal was to convince a small group of moderate GOP senators to vote against hearing testimony from witnesses like Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who had claimed in a book that Trump specifically told him that he withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to obtain an investigation into Biden and his son. The book’s release had rattled the entire GOP conference.

Mitch McConnell, then-Senate Majority leader, played a key role in convincing GOP senators. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to vote against hearing from witnesses in the trial ― an outcome he feared would split the caucus and cost it control of the Senate, but which ended up happening anyway in large part due to the man he was working to protect.

“This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell told his caucus, according to the book. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

McConnell sent Murkowski examples of attacks Democratic groups launched against Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who presided over the trial. Murkowski was presented with the following argument by McConnell: If she votes to allow witnesses, it would tie at 50-50. Roberts would then have to break the tie and make an unpopular decision that would anger both sides.

At one point during the Q&A portion of the trial, McConnell’s top legal counsel Andrew Ferguson dictated an answer to an overtly leading question posed by Republican senators and urged Trump’s legal team to deliver it before the Senate. The answer essentially conceded that even if Trump had done what Democrats alleged, it wasn’t impeachable. The book recounts:

Trump’s team answered it as intended and the motion to hear witnesses ultimately failed in a 51-49 vote. Only Romney and Senator Susan Collins from Maine joined Democrats in voting witnesses.

The book also details how Murkowski struggled with her decision on witness testimony after publicly calling out McConnell over his pledge to act in “total coordination” with the Trump White House as the trial unfolded. McConnell cited as precedent President Bill Clinton’s contacts with Democratic senators during his 1999 impeachment trial. But Murkowski blasted McConnell over his view that jurors aren’t really impartial, saying in an interview before the trial kicked off that she was “disturbed” by his comments.

The interview earned Murkowski an “angry” email from McConnell the next day, according to the book.

In an interview with the book’s authors, the Alaska Republican, who is facing reelection next month, compared her Trump-dominated party to an animal native to her state:

This article was originally published on HuffPost. It has since been updated.