The newly drawn boundaries of the district encompass the urban areas in Arapahoe County and Adams County, including the entire city of Aurora. The district is among the state’s most racially and ethnically diverse, and Democrats have a significant advantage in the former swing district.

Whether looking at registration or performance, it����ap not going to be as competitive as the old district was, said Mario Nicolais, an election law attorney and political strategist. Add to that how well known Monahan is and how much money the party spends to support him – both considerably less than when Mike Coffman was the GOP nominee – and it����ap going to be an uphill battle, he said.

“These things tend to feed on each other,” Nicolais said. “When the numbers don’t look good, the money doesn’t follow.”

By his own admission, Monahan is not getting financial support from the party in the race. He calls himself a moderate Republican who thinks neither party is doing a good enough job and says he is not an election denier.

Like Crow, Monahan is a veteran. He decided to run for office because he said he “had to stop just stomping around my kitchen and complaining about it” and wanted to be able to tell his kids that he tried to make the world better. He first moved to Colorado in 2000, joined the Navy and returned to Colorado in 2019.

But the policy differences between the two candidates are stark. Crow, an Army veteran who is on the Armed Services Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Small Business Committee, has worked on legislation to expand immigration access and provide more oversight of immigration detention centers, and on legislation for gun violence prevention and reducing prescription drug costs.

Crow of Aurora said he first ran for office because of the “unique threats posed to our democracy” by Donald Trump, and he served as an impeachment manager during Trump’s first impeachment.

“I’m also just being a voice for what our values as a community in a state are, and pushing back against dangerous and extreme rhetoric,” he said. “I think what one of the things we’ve learned is that words matter a lot, and they matter when they come from the highest offices and people that hold titles. And when people speak words that can incite violence and extremism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and homophobia and other things, people get hurt.”

Crow is also working to expand abortion and health care access for military servicemembers, reform visa programs and tackle issues of supply chain redevelopment.

“… My policy positions are actually aligned with the community and the district overwhelmingly,” he said. “If you just look at the things that I support, and that I’m about whether it’s protecting abortion rights, acting on the climate, comprehensive immigration reform gun violence, prevention, access to health care … I support issues that the community supports.”

Monahan, who lives in the tech center area, doesn’t agree with Crow’s policy solutions. Among Monahan’s top issues are getting spending under control and figuring out how to pass a balanced budget, starting the global supply chain in the U.S. as a matter of national security and fixing what he calls the “faltering” economy. He doesn’t support federal abortion legislation and believes the decision should be left to the states, and he opposes transgender inclusion in women’s sports as well as “compulsory requirements by commanders, from everything from climate action to pronouns.”

He wants to secure the border and “empower Border Patrol” and has the endorsement of John Fabbricatore, retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement Denver field office director.

Monahan believes the district is ready for change, and unlike Crow who “is supported by and is representing his party,” Monahan said he promises to push back against both Democrats and Republicans.

“Hopefully, we can get a handle on inflation rather quickly,” he said, adding that that will be a multi-pronged approach. “We have to get the economy back on its feet.”

Libertarian candidate and Army veteran Eric Mulder is also seeking the seat in the November election.

Sondland alleges in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, that Pompeo had committed to reimburse his legal expenses after he was subpoenaed by House Democrats to testify in an impeachment case that accused then-President Donald Trump of withholding military aid from Ukraine while demanding an investigation into political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Instead, Sondland says, Pompeo “reneged on his promise” after learning the details of Sondland’s testimony.

“With the contractual commitment of Pompeo having been abandoned apparently for political convenience, Ambassador Sondland turns to this Court to reimburse his attorneys’ fees and costs and make him whole,” Sondland’s lawyer, Mark Barondess, wrote in his lawsuit.

A spokesperson for Pompeo called the lawsuit “ludicrous” and said Pompeo was “confident the court will see it the same way.”

In testimony that Sondland’s lawsuit describes as “highly fraught, highly charged and highly risky with tremendous consequences,” he described for investigators how Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, explicitly sought a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine, leveraging an Oval Office visit for political investigations of Democrats.

Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted in February 2020 by the Senate.

Sondland was fired days after Trump’s acquittal “simply for telling the truth,” according to the lawsuit. He says the unwillingness to cover his legal fees not only represented a breach of commitment and “normal convention” but was also “especially problematic in this instance because the amount of preparation needed to comply with the subpoenas was staggering.”

“Ambassador Sondland retained a Washington, D.C. law firm well experienced in Congressional investigations that possessed the capacity to assist him, along with his long-time personal counsel, in preparation for his critically important testimony,” the lawsuit states. “Ambassador Sondland continued to rely on Pompeo’s individual promise, on behalf of himself and the Government, in seeking outside counsel and incurred nearly $1.8 million in attorneys’ fees and costs.”

The lawsuit was first reported by The Washington Post.

Next to her, seated at a narrow wooden table, was Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, the son of Eritrean immigrants and the first African American to represent his state in Congress. Across from them at his new desk was Sen. Raphael Warnock, the first Black Democrat to represent the South in the Senate. Plaskett was the lone elected Black woman in the room.

“I turned to Joe, and I was like: ‘Look at this — isn’t this awesome? This is something,’” Plaskett recalled in an interview. “It made me kind of tear up at that moment.”

After historic turns as House impeachment managers for the Senate trial of President Donald Trump, both Plaskett and Neguse emerged from the proceedings with national platforms and as high-profile faces of a Democratic coalition that is younger and more diverse than its leaders.

Even though their prosecution failed to deliver a conviction, both lawmakers said they hope to turn their newfound prominence into gains for their constituents as President Joe Biden barrels forward with an ambitious agenda for economic stimulus and other overhauls. And in interviews after the trial’s conclusion, both said they were conscious of their roles as among the few Black lawmakers who took part in an impeachment of a former president whose race-baiting and anti-immigration stances helped create deep divisions in the country.

“It certainly was not lost on me that in moments during the trial, as I stood there, or as Stacey, my friend, stood there in the well of the Senate, there are only four or less — depending on whether the senators were in the room — Black elected officials in the room,” Neguse said in an interview. “That is certainly unique. I think Stacey and I both worked really hard to do justice in terms of honoring the experiences of so many people of color that day.”

Both of their careers were already marked with notations for the history books: Neguse, 36, is the youngest impeachment manager in the country’s history, while Plaskett, 54, is the first delegate from a U.S. territory to hold the role. They are just the second pair of Black lawmakers to hold the role.

“There’s always a different level of pressure on Black members of Congress to make sure that we’re carrying ourselves in a way that represents the district, the community and the struggles of those who have come before us,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., one of the first two Black impeachment managers, along with Rep. Val B. Demings, D-Fla., during Trump’s first impeachment trial. “Joe Neguse and Stacey Plaskett shouldered that burden in an extraordinary way.”

Neguse, a graduate from the University of Colorado Law School, worked at a law firm before seeking political office. Plaskett was a student of Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead impeachment manager, at American University’s Washington College of Law. A political appointee at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, she also served as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, New York, and counsel to the House ethics committee before running for Congress.

On a team of nine that had a shared century of legal experience, Neguse and Plaskett delivered some of the most powerful moments of the trial. Neguse helped burnish the argument in favor of the constitutionality of trying a former president and contributed to closing remarks. Plaskett steered senators through a detailed recounting of the violence and how close it came to them, and she offered a powerful rebuke of the Trump defense team’s use of footage of women of color to equate Trump’s remarks ahead of the Capitol attack with statements from Democrats.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)The swift nature of the trial also intensified the pair’s juggling act of parenthood and their work, still a rarity in Congress. Neguse’s infant daughter made an appearance on at least one Zoom call with the managers, while at one point Plaskett had her sixth-grade daughter working on a literature assignment in a back room during the trial when her husband had a meeting.

“‘My sitting here is the combination of so many sacrifices,’” Plaskett said, reading from a note to herself and her family during the last day of the trial. “‘Always remember that to whom much is given, much is required.’ I didn’t want to forget that.”

Just three dozen lawmakers have served as prosecutors of a president in an impeachment trial, a role that helped vault several to higher office. With impeachment trials historically serving as inherently partisan proceedings, their roles as managers could also open Plaskett and Neguse to increasing partisan attacks.

Their political futures are murkier, in part because of the unique circumstances of their respective districts, even as they drew acclaim for their work on impeachment.

While senators in both parties privately predicted that Neguse would one day join their ranks, it is unlikely that he would mount a primary challenge to either Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat who is up for reelection in 2022, or Sen. John Hickenlooper, who just began his six-year term after defeating Cory Gardner in November.

Because the Virgin Islands constitute a U.S. territory, Plaskett has no vote on the House floor, let alone Senate counterparts.

“I’m hoping to use this position and whatever that means to benefit the people who brought me to that table and to that podium for that impeachment trial,” Plaskett said. “At the end of the day, that����ap the people of the Virgin Islands.”

Even before the pair took on the prosecutorial mantle, Neguse and Plaskett had parlayed their experience into more prominent roles within the House Democratic caucus. Neguse, in his second term, is part of the formal leadership circle of Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. And just before she was tapped for the role of manager, Plaskett said, she was still reveling in the news that she would be the first territory representative to sit on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

“I’m going to work hard to try to, you know, to talk to folks that have a different worldview than I do and to try to find common ground,” Neguse said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to work with each other.”

It����ap hard to imagine a more hectic freshman term for a congressman.

“Maybe I have a knack for timing with public service that I end up going into government and public service work during very turbulent times. It does seem to be my history,” the Aurora Democrat said this fall, noting he joined the Army in 2002, soon after the war in Afghanistan began and just before the Iraq War.

Crow’s roommate in Washington, Rep. Joe Neguse, also entered Congress in January 2019, immediately won a position within House Democratic leadership, and worked on the committee that wrote and approved articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, all before the age of 36.

“‘Whirlwind’ is the right word for it,” the Lafayette Democrat said with a laugh.

“I don’t know if any of us in the freshman class anticipated that, upon our election, we would be sworn in during the longest government shutdown in the modern history of our federal government; that we would have very contentious impeachment proceedings, which I participated in as a member of the Judiciary Committee; and then of course, a once-in-100-year pandemic.”

There were tragedies back home too. In Crow’s district, the STEM school shooting, the death of Elijah McClain in police custody, and ongoing issues at an Aurora immigration facility. In Neguse’s, massive wildfires raged and mountain towns struggled mightily without tourists. In both, families and businesses are hurting.

“This is the wildest Congress to be a freshman in in any time in the modern era. I wouldn’t even hesitate to say that,” said Matt Glassman, a former congressional researcher who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University.

“To me, there’s nothing comparable to this. Essentially, you have spending bills that dwarf the 2009 stimulus, paired with executive-legislative battles that are on par with Watergate or more so, and a government shutdown that dwarfs 2013’s. What else can we have here? This is just crazy.”

Pandemics have spread across America before. Polarizing impeachments have occurred before. Economic calamities have struck before. Supreme Court justices have died before. And racial unrest has certainly reared its ugly head before. But what makes the 116th Congress unique is that it all occurred in two short years.

“This Congress hasn’t had an utterly earth-shattering incident like the 13th Congress when the British were burning Washington, or the 36th Congress when secession happened, or even the 78th Congress when the (Second World) War was just starting in 1943,” Glassman said. “Those are the sort of incidents that are not comparable, but leave those cataclysmic events aside and I can’t really think of a Congress that����ap had the sum total of twists and turns of this one.”

For Neguse and Crow, those twists and turns have forced them to be reactive, rather than proactive, more often than they would like. Legislative priorities have been sidelined by crises and scandals du jour, and the congressional freshmen have had to respond to the unpredictable actions of an often mercurial president.

“It absolutely has been challenging because the number of crises, and the depth of those crises, and the regularity of them, has been unprecedented,” Crow said.

“I’m certainly optimistic, particularly with the election of President-elect Biden, that it will be a return to normalcy, rationality, sanity,” Neguse said, “and the ability for our federal government to make progress on the issues that matter to the American people.”

For now, and for the foreseeable future, the top issues will involve responding to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and shoved the nation’s economy off a sudden cliff. Democrats must do so with the smallest House majority in two decades, leaving little room for dissension in a Democratic caucus known to harbor philosophical disagreements, especially among freshmen.

“And there’s never been a time I can remember when freshmen were so powerful,” said Grossman, recalling the bygone days of 20th century Congresses, when freshmen were almost always quiet and weak, biding their time until seniority.

“Freshmen now are not sitting around, being good to the leaders, and waiting to set the agenda. They’re out there actively organizing and actively trying to shape the public agenda,” he explained. “They don’t have power internally — they’re not the committee chairs — but you can see them fighting and leveraging million-person Instagram accounts into power within the chamber.”

What lies ahead for the now-sophomore representatives from Colorado is impossible to predict, but both hope for fewer presidential tweets to respond to and more proactive work on policy priorities, such as climate change.

“By no means will it be a quiet two years in the 117th Congress,” Neguse said, before making a characteristically cheery prediction: “I do believe that now we’ll be able to return to a time when folks can actually listen to each other and exchange views respectfully and try to collaborate for the common good.”

“I’m looking forward to that, let����ap just say,” he added with a laugh.

Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William Barr.

Bolton also adds a striking new allegation by saying that Trump overtly linked trade negotiations to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping of China to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

The book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled publication next Tuesday. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official and is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time “since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers.” And Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president.

Bolton thought Trump’s diplomatic flirtation with the likes of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and President Vladimir Putin of Russia were ill-advised and even “foolish” and spent much of his tenure trying to stop the president from making what he deemed bad deals. He eventually resigned last September — Trump claimed he fired him — after they clashed over Iran, North Korea, Ukraine and a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Romney was joined by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark, for a conversation at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. The event was hosted by the , a non-profit founded by Rasmussen to advance democracies and free markets.

“I am so honored to be on stage with what I would say is a true profile in courage,” Rasmussen said of Romney during his opening remarks, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd of about 300 people in a packed university auditorium.

“There are a couple of times I have said things or taken positions that were more expedient than they were based upon conviction. I remember those things precisely and I regret them enormously,” Romney said. “And I said, ‘I’m not doing that again.’ I’ve reached a point in my life where I look back and I say of all the things I’ve done in my life, I think those couple of things really stand out and they really bother me. Years, decades later, and I’m not going to do that anymore.”

Rasmussen and Romney spent the rest of their time discussing burgeoning democracies, nationalism, geopolitics and emerging technologies. They lamented decreases in democracy and increases in nationalism around the world.

“There has been a realignment, to a certain degree, of our (political) parties,” Romney said, noting that blue-collar Americans, especially in the Midwest, voted solidly Democrat for years, before backing President Donald Trump in large numbers. And, he noted, many college-educated women have left the GOP.

“I think that’s difficult for my party,” Romney said of the realignment, “because we’re not doing well with young people. We’re not doing well with minorities. We’re not doing well with women. And if you’re not doing well with those groups, it’s going to be hard long-term to be successful.”

On Feb. 5, Romney was the only Republican senator to vote to convict President Donald Trump for abuse of power, joining all Democrats and independents in doing so. Romney voted to acquit the president on a second charge, for obstruction of Congress. The president was ultimately acquitted of both counts.

“During the trial, (Romney) was paying attention the whole time,” Rep. Jason Crow, an Aurora Democrat and prosecutor in the impeachment trial, told The Denver Post on Tuesday. “He was glued to his seat, he was laser focused, he was taking notes the whole time.”

“On several occasions,” Crow recalled, “he would come up and say, ‘This is a little bit unclear to me, can you tell us exactly how we know that Ukrainians knew the hold was in place before Sept. 1? That picture isn’t quite complete to me. Can you flesh that out some more?’ And we would. He was genuinely interested in getting the facts and the right result, whatever that happened to be, and he did what was necessary.”

Updated 8:45 a.m. March 3, 2020 The photo caption on this story originally misidentified the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

“There is no question in the mind of any American why this man’s job is over, why this country now has one less soldier serving it at the White House,” said David Pressman, partner at a New York legal firm that represented Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. “Lt. Col. Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth. His honor, his commitment to right, frightened the powerful.”

Vindman status at the National Security Council, the foreign policy arm of the White House, had been uncertain since he testified that he didn’t think it was “proper” for Trump to “demand that a foreign government investigate” former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s dealings with the energy company Burisma in Ukraine. Vindman’s ouster seemed even more certain after Trump mocked him Thursday during his post-acquittal celebration with Republican supporters in the East Room and said Friday that he was not happy with him.

“I’m not happy with him,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House to head to North Carolina. “You think I’m supposed to be happy with him? I’m not. … They are going to be making that decision.”

Vindman, a 20-year Army veteran, wore his uniform full of medals, including a purple heart, when he appeared late last year for what turned out to be a testy televised impeachment hearing. Trump supporters raised questions about the Soviet Jewish immigrant����ap allegiance to the United States and noted that he had received offers to work for the government of Ukraine — offers Vindman said he swiftly dismissed.

“I am an American,” he stated emphatically.

When the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, addressed him as “Mr. Vindman,” the Iraq War veteran replied: “Ranking member, it����ap Lt. Col. Vindman please.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked what the Pentagon would do to ensure that Vindman faces no retribution when he is reassigned to the Pentagon from the White House. He referred the question to the Army, in terms of Vindman’s next assignment, but on the retribution aspect, he said, “We protect all of our service members from retribution or anything like that. We’ve already addressed that in policy and other means.”

AP Writers Zeke Miller, Eric Tucker and Bob Burns contributed to this report.

Republican Sen. Cory Gardner voted to acquit President Donald Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet voted to convict. Trump was acquitted on both counts.

Gardner, a Yuma Republican, announced about an hour before the votes that he would support acquittal, but did not say whether the president’s actions were appropriate.

In a speech on the Senate floor and a phone interview soon after, the senator said the Trump case was about whether the government can investigate how tax dollars are spent, not about the president’s withholding of military aid to coerce Ukraine to investigate a political rival.

“The question before us is whether or not a policy question can be grounds for impeachment. The policy question is, can the president be impeached for looking at how taxpayer dollars are being spent? I simply don’t think that����ap true,” Gardner said in the Denver Post interview, after he was asked twice whether Trump acted inappropriately in his dealings with Ukraine.

“What we did not see over the last two weeks was a conclusive reason to remove the president of the United States, an act that would nullify the 2016 election and rob roughly half the country of their preferred candidate for the 2020 election,” Gardner said on the Senate floor.

The senator, who faces re-election in November, criticized Democrats for requesting witnesses in the Senate’s trial of Trump, claiming Democrats’ case could not truly be overwhelming and airtight if they were asking that witnesses and further documents be subpoenaed.

“In their partisan — partisan — race to impeach, the House failed to do the fundamental work required to prove its case, to meet the heavy burden,” Gardner said.

Earlier in the afternoon, Bennet, a Denver Democrat, excoriated the Republican-controlled Senate, saying senators were failing a test to save American democracy.

Colorado’s senior senator, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Trump’s behavior was clearly unconstitutional and impeachable, but spent most of his time criticizing the Senate for voting last week not to call witnesses in its trial.

“It’s pitiful! It is disgraceful! And it will be a stain on this body for all time,” Bennet said, yelling on the Senate floor.

“We have become a body that does nothing. We’re an employment agency. That’s what we are. Seventy-five percent of the votes we took last year were on appointments,” he said, a statistic that he called “pathetic.”

Bennet spoke of his family’s history and the nation’s history, citing the Founding Fathers, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. The nation is imperfect and always has been, he said, but it was great because it was capable, at least in the past, of curing its imperfections. He questioned whether the Senate is capable of solving today’s problems in its current state.

“I say to the American people: Our democracy is very much at risk. I’m not one of those people who believes Donald Trump is the source of all our problems. I think he’s made matters much worse, to be sure, but he is a symptom of our problems. He is a symptom of our failure to tend to the democracy,” Bennet said.

“We are being asked to save the democracy, and we’re going to fail that test today in the United States Senate. My prayer for our country … is that the American people won’t fail that test. And I’m optimistic that we won’t. We’ve never failed it before, and I don’t think we’ll fail it in our time,” he said in closing.

Golden resident Steve Forgy, a 56-year-old CEO of a small company, told The Denver Post last week that any member of Congress who favored Trump’s removal from office should be removed from office themselves.

“I’d vote any of them supporting impeachment out. It’s a moot point, and it’s why I’m a big believer in term limits. I’m tired of all politicians not getting anything accomplished,” he said.

But Tuesday evening, about 130 protesters gathered in mid-20-degree weather outside the Byron Rogers Federal Building in downtown Denver to protest Trump’s acquittal. Among the signs: “45 is not above the law — shame on the GOP” and “We wanted a fair trial. We got a cover-up.”

“You can’t have a fair trial without witnesses and documents,” said Adrian Pulido, 24, of Denver. “So I feel like the American people are right to be mad about the outcome. They cut it off at the knees.”

A majority of senators have now expressed unease with Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine that resulted in the two articles of impeachment. But there’s nowhere near the two-thirds support necessary in Republican-held Senate for the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors to convict and remove the president from office.

The outcome expected Wednesday caps nearly five months of remarkable impeachment proceedings launched in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House, ending in Mitch McConnell’s Senate and reflective of the nation’s unrelenting partisan divide three years into the Trump presidency.

No president has ever been removed by the Senate, and Trump arrived at the Capitol for his State of the Union address on the eve of the vote eager to use the tally as vindication, a political anthem in his reelection bid. Allies chanted “four more years!”

The president did not mention impeachment. The mood was tense in the House that impeached him. Pelosi tore up the speech when he was done.

The Wednesday afternoon vote is expected to be swift. With Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, senators sworn to do “impartial justice” will stand at their desk for the roll call and state their votes — “guilty” or “not guilty.”

On the first article of impeachment, Trump is charged with abuse of power. On the second, obstruction of Congress.

Few senators are expected to stray from party camps, all but ensuring the highly partisan impeachment yields deeply partisan acquittal. Both Bill Clinton in the 1999 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 drew cross-party support when they were left in office after an impeachment trial. President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face revolt from his own party.

Ahead of voting, some of the most closely watched senators took to the Senate floor to tell their constituents, and the nation, what they had decided. The Senate chaplain has been opening the trial proceedings with daily prayers for the senators.

“This decision is not about whether you like or dislike this president,” began GOP Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine centrist, announcing her resolve to acquit on both charges.

GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said that while he doesn’t condone Trump’s actions, he was not prepared to remove him from the ballot nine months before the election. “Let the people decide,” he said.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has floated the idea of censuring Trump instead, a signal of a possible vote to acquit. Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor seeking reelection in strongly pro-Trump Alabama, told reporters he’s likely to announce his vote Wednesday morning.

Most Democrats, though, echoed the House managers’ warnings that Trump, if left unchecked, would continue to abuse the power of his office for personal political gain and try to “cheat” again ahead of the the 2020 election.

During the nearly three-week trial, House Democrats prosecuting the case argued that Trump abused power like no other president in history when he pressured Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

They detailed an extraordinary shadow diplomacy run by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that set off alarms at the highest levels of government. Trump, after asking Ukraine’s president for “a favor” in a July 25 phone call, temporarily halted U.S. aid to the struggling ally battling hostile Russia at its border.

When the House probed Trump’s actions, he instructed White House aides to defy congressional subpoenas, leading to the obstruction charge.

Questions from the Ukraine matter continue to swirl. House Democrats may yet summon former national security adviser John Bolton to testify about revelations from his forthcoming book that offer a fresh account of Trump’s actions. Other eyewitnesses and documents are almost sure to surface.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Wednesday that Democrats are “likely” to subpoena Bolton but that a final decision hadn’t yet been made.

In closing arguments for the trial the lead prosecutor, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., appealed to senators’ sense of decency, that “right matters” and “truth matters”‘ and that Trump “is not who you are.”

“You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake our country,” Schiff intoned. “He will not change. And you know it.”

Pelosi was initially reluctant to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump when she took control of the House after the 2018 election, dismissively telling more liberal voices that “he’s not worth it.”

Trump and his GOP allies in Congress argue that Democrats have been trying to undercut him from the start. Trump calls both special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the impeachment probe a “hoax” and says he did nothing wrong.

But a whistleblower complaint of his conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy set off alarms. When Trump told Pelosi in September that the call was perfect, she was stunned. “Perfectly wrong,” she said. Days later, the speaker announced the formal impeachment inquiry.

The result is a 28,000-page record from the House, based on testimony from 17 witnesses, including national security officials and ambassadors, in public and private depositions and House hearings.

The result was the quickest, most partisan impeachment in U.S. history, with no Republicans joining the House Democrats to vote for the charges. The Republican Senate kept up the pace with the fastest trial ever, and the first with no witnesses or deliberations.

Trump’s celebrity legal team with attorney Alan Dershowitz made the sweeping, if stunning, assertion that even if the president engaged in the quid pro quo as described, it is not impeachable, because politicians often view their own political interest with the national interest.

McConnell commands a 53-47 Republican majority and braced against dissent. Some GOP senators distanced themselves from Trump’s defense, and other Republicans brushed back calls from conservatives to disclose the name of the anonymous whistleblower. The Associated Press typically does not reveal the identity of whistleblowers.

Trump’s approval rating, which has generally languished in the mid- to low-40s, hit a new high of 49% in the latest Gallup polling, which was conducted as the Senate trial was drawing to a close. The poll found that 51% of the public views the Republican Party favorably, the first time the GOP’s number has exceeded 50% since 2005.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

During , Buck was asked about , R-Iowa, that under House Democrats’ current standards for impeachment, which Republicans consider to be very low, Biden could be impeached next year if he is elected president this November.

“There is no reason to wait for that. Vice President Biden could be impeached now. There’s no reason that you have to only impeach someone who is in office,” said Buck, a former federal prosecutor and chair of the Colorado Republican Party.

“You can hold the hearings; you can gather the evidence; you can move forward. The extent of the corruption that you see — at least the allegations of corruption that you see — around the Biden family is very troubling.”

Though the Bidens have never been charged with wrongdoing, Republicans have alleged that Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, at a time when his father was vice president and heavily engaged in U.S.-Ukrainian affairs, was improper.

“Congress is one of those bodies that has the ability, and should, look at past administrations and current administrations and make sure that people are acting honorably,” Buck said Monday.

Buck’s spokeswoman, Lindsey Curnutte, said the congressman believes Democrats have set the bar so low that any future president could be impeached under new Democratic standards. Buck also believes Congress has an oversight role and that there are serious allegations surrounding the Bidens, she said.

“In last night’s interview,” Curnutte said Tuesday, “he was laying out Congress’ constitutional ability to impeach former federal officials.”

Morgan Carroll, chair of the state Democratic Party, released this comment: “Ken Buck’s absurd statement demonstrates the serious moral decay of today’s Republican Party leaders. Impeachment is a serious and somber process used only for the most egregious abuses of office.”

Buck is a member of the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee, which crafted and approved articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in December over his pressure on Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and Burisma.

During the impeachment hearings, Buck often criticized Democrats for, in his opinion, greatly lowering the bar on impeachment. He also routinely accused them of trying to impeach Trump from the first day he took office.

Meanwhile, in the impeachment trial Monday, U.S. Rep. Jason Crow made his closing argument to senators, telling them they have a duty to convict the president.

The Aurora Democrat as the seven impeachment managers made their final case to the Senate and the American people. He quoted from the nation’s Founding Fathers and former giants of the Senate, such as Daniel Webster, as he urged senators to do what they almost certainly will not do: convict the president and remove him from office.

“I submit to you, on behalf of the House of Representatives, that your duty demands you convict President Trump,” Crow said. “I don’t pretend this is an easy process. It����ap not designed to be easy. It shouldn’t be easy to impeach or convict a president. Impeachment is an extraordinary remedy, a tool only to be used in rare instances of grave misconduct, but it is in the Constitution for a reason.”

Crow’s speech, which lasted about eight minutes, came on the 12th day of Senate proceedings in the trial of Trump. Senators will have until Wednesday afternoon to consider their historic vote and make speeches on the Senate floor explaining that vote.

“What you decide on these articles (of impeachment) will have lasting implications for the future of the presidency,” Crow told senators. “Not only for this president, but for all future presidents. Whether the office of the presidency of the United States of America is above the law, that is the question.”

In a speech heavy on historical mentions, Crow recalled a decision by prominent Republicans in 1974 to visit President Richard Nixon, who had been consumed by the Watergate scandal, and urge him to resign. He quoted Barry Goldwater, who said at the time, “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many.”

Trump has told several falsehoods about the Ukraine scandal, Crow alleged: that military aid was not withheld to force investigations; that his July 25, 2019, call with Ukraine’s president was perfect; that he had an altruistic concern about corruption; that Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

“How many falsehoods can we take?” Crow asked the 100 senators. “When will it be one too many?”