Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton in a new book bragged that he didn’t bother reading the evidence presented during the first impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump.
In fact, Cotton boasts that he spent his time refusing to pay attention – pretending to read materials relevant to the president’s trial – but hiding his real reading matter under a fake cover so that reporters couldn’t see what he was actually doing, The Guardian reports.
“My aides delivered a steady flow of papers and photocopied books, hidden underneath a fancy cover sheet labeled ‘Supplementary Impeachment Materials’, so nosy reporters sitting above us in the Senate gallery couldn’t see what I was reading,” he wrote. “They probably would’ve reported that I wasn’t paying attention to the trial.”
Instead of reading the evidence against Trump over his attempts to shake down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for political dirt on Joe Biden, Cotton claims he was paying attention to a more important story.
“The outcome of the impeachment trial was a foregone conclusion, and it wouldn’t impact the daily lives of normal Americans,” he wrote.
Cotton claims that he voted to acquit Trump because despite senators having “heard from 17 witnesses … and received more than 28,000 pages of documents”, Democrats had not presented their case correctly.
Read the full report at The Guardian.
