President Donald Trump allegedly dismissed Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s remark that impeachment had been a lesson for him just a day prior to his expected acquittal.
Asked about Collins’s comment during a private lunch with news anchors ahead of the State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump said that he’d done nothing wrong, The Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with the meeting.
“It was a perfect call,” Trump added, an apparent reference to his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he pushed the leader to announce investigations into his political opponents. Trump and his allies have repeatedly argued that his conversations with Zelensky were “perfect”.
The House in December voted to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after an inquiry into his alleged dealings with Ukraine. Trump is alleged to have withheld nearly $400 million in military aid in an effort to push for probes of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son and unfounded conspiracy theory related to the 2016 election.
The Senate trial, which began last month, is expected to end in an acquittal on Wednesday. The end to the trial comes after Republicans blocked a motion to allow new witnesses and documents.
Collins, who was one of two Republicans to vote in favor of new witnesses, said Tuesday that it was “wrong” for Trump to mention Biden, a 2020 presidential candidate, on his phone call with the Ukrainian president. But she said she would vote to acquit the President because the House did not meet the “burden of showing that the president’s conduct, however flawed, warrants the extreme step of immediate removal from office.”
Asked on CBS whether she was confident that Trump wouldn’t attempt to seek foreign assistance again, Collins argued that the President had learned a lesson from the impeachment.
“I believe that the president has learned from this case,” she said. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson. I believe that he will be much more cautious in the future.”
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