Jeff Flake Has Unique Take on Senate Trial of Trump

Former Sen. Jeff Flake has his own take on how the Senate would respond to President Trump's impeachment, Fox News reports. "At least 35" Republican senators would support impeachment if the vote were held privately, he said Thursday at the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival. "I heard someone say if there were a private vote there would be 30 Republican votes. That's not true," he added in a Q&A. "There would be at least 35." The frequent Trump critic talked more about it Friday, telling WBUR that "anybody who has sat through two years, as I have, of Republican luncheons realizes that there's not a lot of love for the president."

"There's a lot of fear of what it means to go against the president, but most Republican senators would not like to be dealing with this for another year or another five years," he went on. "So yeah, a private vote would go a lot differently, but that doesn't matter because that's just a hypothetical." Asked what he thought of Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry, he said, "That was a pretty damning transcript. That was not anything you want your president to be doing. So I think we need to wait for the investigation to conclude and wait for likely testimony from the whistleblower him or herself before drawing conclusions." (See what Hunter Biden really did in Ukraine—a key to the whole impeachment process.)