On January 30, the co-hosts of Fox & Friends defended President Donald Trump from his Senate impeachment trial by suggesting that no witnesses be called and the trial come to a conclusion by Friday, January 31, “either to acquit the president, or something else, we don’t know.”
Brian Kilmeade claimed that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) are attempting to “play this out, elongate this entire process," and “continuing to change the rules” because “their endgame is to extend this game.” Kilmeade added that “instead of saying, ‘Well, we want to get to the truth,’ it’s pretty obvious they want to play this out and they’ll never be satisfied.”
Ainsley Earhardt said she hoped that the Democrats would not “have enough Republicans that are in favor of calling extra witnesses,” such as former national security adviser John Bolton, so that “this will end on Friday and we hopefully won’t talk about this again.” The Fox & Friends co-hosts also cited Utah opinion polling to pressure Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has considered voting to allow witnesses, to fall in line with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the majority of Senate Republicans, who oppose new witnesses.
Steve Doocy also dismissed calls for more witnesses, repeating a Trump lawyer’s argument that all witnesses should have been called during the House impeachment investigation instead. Doocy acknowledged that the House did request Bolton’s testimony, but admonished Democratic leaders for choosing not to fight for it in court against a likely assertion of Trump’s executive privilege. Earhardt followed up with the allegation that because Schiff was “throwing in new information that wasn’t in the articles of impeachment,” Trump’s impeachment trial is now similar to a criminal “mistrial” -- even though just an hour before, Fox’s senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano had told her that a Senate impeachment trial has fundamentally different rules from a criminal trial.
