"By any ordinary legal standard, what House Democrats have assembled appears to be woefully inadequate to prove what they want to allege," McConnell said.
ADVERTISEMENTSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday ripped House Democrats' "slapdash" impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump as the "most rushed," "least thorough" and "most unfair" in U.S. history.
In a forceful Senate floor speech, McConnell also slammed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for requesting that the Senate, during its trial, call new witnesses to testify about Trump's Ukraine dealings.
"It is not the Senate's job to leap into the breach and search desperately for ways to get to guilty," McConnell, R-Ky., said. "The fact that my colleague is already desperate to sign up the Senate for new fact-finding … which House Democrats themselves were too impatient to see through, well, that suggests something to me. It suggests that even Democrats who do not like this president are beginning to realize how dramatically insufficient the House's rushed process has been."
He also shredded the entire impeachment process by House Democrats as a "slapdash work product" that was "dumped on us in the Senate" and that "has failed to come anywhere near the bar for impeaching a duly elected American president."
McConnell repeatedly called it "the most rushed," "most unfair," and "least thorough presidential impeachment in our nation's history."
"By any ordinary legal standard, what House Democrats have assembled appears to be woefully inadequate to prove what they want to allege," he added.
McConnell was respondingto a proposal from Schumer, D-N.Y., Sunday night that called for former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to be witnesses at an impeachment trial forTrump.
Schumer, in a letter to McConnell, proposed that the Senate subpoena four people who are close to the president or are expected to know about the delay of about $400 million in military aid to Ukraine: Mulvaney; Bolton; Robert Blair, senior adviser to Mulvaney; and Michael Duffey, associate director for national security at the Office of Management and Budget.
McConnell, on Tuesday, excoriated his colleague for his "11-paragraph letter" that was "delivered by way of the news media."
The "preferable path," McConnell said, "would have been an in-person conversation, which I nonetheless still hope to pursue."