In an exclusive interview with The Gateway Pundit, Sen. Rand Paul warned his GOP colleagues that they may lose their seats if they defy the President and allow Democrats to run the show in the Senate as they did in the House. Could RINOs and wimpy Republicans possibly allow such a thing?
The ever-cautious Paul sees trouble ahead if things aren’t handled properly.
“What I keep trying to convince my colleagues, particularly the ones that might vote to allow the witnesses that the Democrats want to call, is that if they do that and they don’t vote to allow the president to bring his witnesses in, I think the Republican base and Trump supporters are going to be very very unhappy with them. I think it will have electoral consequences — which is sort of my way of saying that maybe they should reconsider having any witnesses at all,” Sen. Paul said. “My hope is some will reconsider and we will just be done with one vote.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that each witness will have to be approved by a majority of 51 senators — something unlikely to work in Trump’s favor. This had lead to Sen. Paul raising an alarm that only those who hate the president will obtain the necessary majority vote.
Sen. Paul explained that if there does end up being a vote for each individual witness, which could potentially be dozens, he believes that only the ones who are antagonistic to the president will get through. This means that “Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and the whistleblower may not pass a majority vote.” He said that if this is how witnesses are decided, the senate will end up with a situation like the House did — a lopsided witness list that would be mostly people hostile to the president.
When asked if he had any other specific witnesses in mind that he was looking to hear, besides Hunter Biden and the whistleblower, Sen. Paul said that “if they end up approving witnesses like Bolton, who I think are harmful, I will insist on a motion that says the president should get to call all witnesses that he or his team deem to be necessary to his defense.”
“I don’t want to limit it, I’m not his lawyer, I don’t want to tell him who he has to call — I’m just going to say anyone. ‘Anyone’ includes people he has mentioned, like Hunter Biden and Joe Biden,” Sen. Paul said.
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Sen. Paul also noted that Rep. Schiff could be a material witness because one of his staffers is friends with the whistleblower and in the same social circle. Schiff has two aides who worked with the whistleblower at the White House. The Washington Examiner reported in October that “Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff’s committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint.”
“Schiff made himself sort of a material witness in the sense that there were reports that one of his staff members is friends with the whistleblower and there was some discussion leading up to this. It’s almost as if this was a planned cabal between Schiff’s staff and this whistleblower,” Sen. Paul said.
“So, yeah, Schiff should be asked about that and his staff should be asked about that, to tell you the truth. They should be asked what kind of communication they had with the whistleblower, when they started, if they have any text messages between themselves and the whistleblower. Maybe their texts look like Peter Strzok’s messages to Lisa Page,” Sen. Paul laughed. “That would be interesting to know, if there was that degree of animus towards the president. Also, the whistleblower, who knows, he’s in government employment — has he been going back and forth with all his colleagues talking about bringing the president down? His lawyer has. He tweeted one week after President Trump was sworn in that ‘now is the time for a coup.’”
Asked about what he believes is the motivation for his Republican colleagues who are defecting on the issue, Sen. Paul said that some of them think it would be a “distraction” and an “uncontrollable scenario with a lack of decorum.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “If they think that, then let’s have no witnesses. You can’t just have witnesses for one side and that is the point I am going to keep making both publicly and privately. It’s not fair to the president.”
“I also think there will be a political price to pay for this, even for Republicans running in purple states, there are strong pro-Trump presences in every purple state. It may not be 50% of the vote, but it’s a third of the vote or more. My guess is that those voters will not be too happy with the Republicans who vote to allow witnesses for the Democrats, but sits there and watches as witnesses the president would like to bring get voted down. I keep telling them it isn’t a threat coming from me, it’s me looking at the politics of this and saying look — you will lose your election.”
Sen. Paul concluded that he will continue to lead this fight and that his colleagues who ignore his advice may regret it when they face the consequences later.
“This is a big deal, I don’t usually lecture my colleagues, but they need to understand that they cannot win an election if they become estranged from the Trump base or Republican base of the party,” he said.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
