GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said in a new interview that she was “disturbed” over Mitch McConnell’s comment that he would work in “total coordination” with the White House during the upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate.
“And in fairness, when I heard that I was disturbed,” Murkowski told KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage in her home state of Alaska.
“To me it means that we have to take that step back from being hand in glove with the defense, and so I heard what leader McConnell had said, I happened to think that that has further confused the process,” she said during the interview, which aired Tuesday.
Democrats have slammed the Senate majority leader, calling on him to allow witnesses and asserting that his pro-President Trump stance won’t result in a fair trial.
Murkowski is one of only a handful of moderate Republican senators who might break from the party’s strong support of the president, though Trump was expected to survive his impeachment by the House, as two-thirds of the GOP-led upper chamber would have to agree to give him the boot.
Unlike pro-Trump colleagues, such as McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham who said they were ready to vote and don’t need to hear any witnesses, Murkowski said she would not “prejudge” the case against the president.
“For me to prejudge and say there’s nothing there, or on the other hand, ‘he should be impeached yesterday,’ that’s wrong. In my view, that’s wrong,” she said.
“If it means that I am viewed as one who looks openly and critically at every issue in front of me rather than acting as a rubber stamp for my party or my president, I am totally good with that. I am totally, totally good with that,” she continued.
Murkowski’s comments come days after fellow GOP moderate Sen. Susan Collins of Maine also expressed disapproval with McConnell’s assertion that he would have “total coordination with White House counsel.”
The House voted earlier this month in favor of two articles of impeachment in a largely party-line vote, one charging the president with abusing the power of his office for personal gain while the other is obstruction of Congress for stonewalling the House probe.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California had not sent them to the Senate as leaders of the upper chamber debate the Senate trial process.
The Kentucky Republican said Monday the talks about a trial are in limbo until senators return to Washington in a couple of weeks, and has resisted Democrats’ calls for top administration officials to testify.