US House, with Republican support, votes to impeach Donald Trump for inciting deadly Capitol insurrection
- Ten Republicans, including Liz Cheney, joined all Democrats in voting to impeach the president by a vote of 232-197
- ‘We don’t need a long investigation to know the president incited right-wing terrorists to attack the Congress to try to overturn constitutional government’
The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting a deadly assault on the Capitol by his supporters a week earlier.
Ten Republicans including Liz Cheney, the party’s No 3 leader in the House, voted in favour of the charge of “incitement of insurrection” by a final tally of 232-197. The article of impeachment will next be sent to the US Senate for trial, though that will not happen until next week at the earliest.
The Republican support made Wednesday’s vote the most bipartisan impeachment in US history; five Democrats voted to impeach president Bill Clinton in 1998.
In announcing her decision ahead of the impeachment vote, Cheney delivered a stinging indictment of Trump, saying that “the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”
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US House impeaches Trump for inciting deadly Capitol attack
Trump, who became the first US president to be impeached twice, proclaimed at a rally in Washington on January 6 that “we are going to have to fight much harder” and “we will never take our country back with weakness” shortly before thousands of people stormed the Capitol in a spree of violence that left one police officer and four others dead.
Thousands of US military personnel camped out in the Capitol overnight to ensure the safety of lawmakers and legislative aides, who narrowly escaped the House and Senate floors before armed pro-Trump extremists made it to the doors of the chambers. Some estimates put the number of troops currently in Washington at more than those stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.