Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he hasn’t spoken to former President Trump since the middle of December, confirming news reports that the Senate GOP leader has cut off personal contact with the former president.
“The last time I spoke with him was the day after I declared that Biden had obviously won the election after the Electoral College [voted on] Dec. 14. It would have been Dec. 15,” McConnell told reporters.
McConnell’s statement follows reports by associates that he is “furious” over the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by a pro-Trump mob that was spurred on by the president’s baseless claims the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.
He declined to say whether he thought Trump had committed an impeachable offense by urging on the violent crowd.
“With regard to impeachment issues, we’re going to be addressing that in great depth here beginning shortly. We’re going to be sworn in,” he said, noting there would be a vote on a pretrial agreement laying out the procedure for the trial.
McConnell declined for weeks to publicly acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect after the Nov. 3 election while Trump and his legal team pursued claims of widespread election fraud in courts.
The Electoral College voted on Dec. 14 to formally elect Biden as the nation’s next president. The vote was 306 to 232, the same margin by which Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 before a few faithless electors changed the final result.
McConnell congratulated Biden as president-elect on the Senate floor on Dec. 15.
The GOP leader led the opposition to Republican objections to the electoral slates of Arizona and Pennsylvania when Congress gathered in a joint session on Dec. 6 to tally the Electoral College’s votes.
“This election actually was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000 and 2004 were all closer than this one,” he said on Jan. 6, shortly before rioters stormed the Capitol to disrupt the joint session.