After weeks of withholding the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she is now likely to transfer them to the Senate next week.
“I have asked Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler to be prepared to bring to the Floor next week a resolution to appoint managers and transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to her colleagues Friday morning.
Pelosi’s announcement comes approximately three weeks after the House voted to impeach President Trump on two counts: abuse of power for allegedly withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine in exchange for an in investigation into a top political rival, and obstructing congress in their attempt to investigate that abuse.
While many lawmakers had expected the House would pass a resolution transmitting the articles and naming the impeachment managers who would make the case to the Senate immediately after the vote, Pelosi had other plans. She told reporters at a press conference following the House votes that she could not send the articles over until she was assured of a fair trial by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “So far, we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” she said at the time.
In the ensuing weeks, McConnell effectively ignored Democrats’ demands for an equitable trial –—which they maintained would need to include witness testimony — and announced on Tuesday that he believed he had the votes to move forward on a rules package similar to the one used in former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, which didn’t mandate witness appearances.
But Pelosi still maintained that she needed to see the rules before transmitting the articles. “My next move is my first move. It’s what I’ve said all along: as soon as we see the arena our members will be participating in, we will send the articles,” she told TIME in an interview earlier this week. “That doesn’t mean it has to meet my standards. We just need to know what it is.”
