[John Berman, Cnn Anchor:] unless the Senate agrees to hear witnesses at a trial. Mitch McConnell says fine, don't send them. But the key new ingredient that will complicate McConnell's life is this the president wants a trial, and soon.
[Alisyn Camerota, Cnn Anchor:] Meanwhile, it was a smaller stage for the Democratic debate last night, but it delivered some big moments and a lot of substance. This on the day after President Trump was impeached. For the first time South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was a target after his rise in the Iowa polls. The seven candidates also had some heated discussions over health care and their own experience. One candidate who was on the stage, Amy Klobuchar, and who did not and another one, who did not make the cut, Senator Cory Booker, both of them are going to join us later this hour. But joining us right now, we have Bianna Golodyrga, CNN senior global affairs analyst, Elie Honig, CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, and Laura Jarrett, CNN justice correspondent. Great to have you all here. Let's talk about where we are with impeachment, because I need you guys to explain how this impasse is going to be broken. So Nancy Pelosi says she is not going to send the articles of impeachment over until Mitch McConnell can guarantee here that it's going to be a short trial. Mitch McConnell has guaranteed that he will not be an impartial juror and in fact he is working hand in glove with the White House. And he also says, fine, don't send them over. I don't want to have a trial in the Senate. As John pointed out, the only fly in the ointment here since they both agree they don't want a Senate trial is that the president wants to have that moment of President Trump being acquitted in the Senate. So what is going to happen, Elie?
[Elie Honig, Cnn Legal Analyst:] Donald Trump needs to get some serious legal advice. And I know he's not the world's easiest client, but somebody needs to sit him down in a serious way and say, you do not want a circus here. You do not want a long, drawn out trial. You are not going to have that moment of vindication. You are winning right now. The status quo right now is Donald Trump will not be convicted in the Senate. One thing they teach us when we're baby prosecutors is, if you are winning in court, shut up and sit down. And someone needs to tell Donald Trump, maybe a little nicer than that, but shut up and sit down.
[Camerota:] But how is it winning to have been impeached without being acquitted?
[Honig:] Oh, no, that's over. But in terms of the ultimate outcome in the Senate. And if he thinks he's going to have a dramatic trial that's going to somehow undo the impeachment in the House, he's kidding himself.
[Berman:] That's the thing. The president wants a Senate trial because in his head, somehow, he thinks it means he can get unimpeached. He can't.
[Honig:] Exactly.
[Berman:] He can't. He's been impeached.
[Honig:] Unimpeachment is not in the Constitution.
[Berman:] It's not a thing. He's been impeached. The question now is whether he'll be removed from office. And with this maneuver, I think a lot of us are wondering yesterday morning, what is Nancy Pelosi doing here? It's a lot more clear to me this morning, at least, because she's created this third party, the president whose interests and Mitch McConnell's are not in line. And there's now tension there.
[Laura Jarrett, Cnn Justice Reporter:] And to have the specter of it weighted over him for a long time. Obviously, the reporting shows he's not happy about it. He's privately fuming about it. He's talking to his buddy Senator Lindsey Graham, saying, what's going on? He thought this was going to be done, maybe even by the Iowa caucuses. And now Nancy Pelosi is wielding her power to show, I don't have to move this along. And so we're going to be at least until January and maybe even longer, because what does she have to lose? To drag this out as long as possible. There may be a tipping point in which voters say, OK, enough is enough already, but right now, she gets to lord this over the whole holidays. He's going to be down at Mar-a-Lago, probably not happy about this.
[Bianna Golodryga, Cnn Senior Global Affairs Analyst:] And the president may have even a bigger reason to want a big show and a trial and to have people like Hunter Biden and Joe Biden testify, because look who had a really good night last night. Joe Biden really found his moment, and even addressing a question of whether or not he was too naive to assume that in a post-Trump world maybe there could be some bipartisanship. And he said, look, I of all people am not naive because I know. Look how they have attacked me. And so you have someone who has came out arguably stronger. And the president, yes, he's always going to be that impeached president, but he wants someone else to go down, too, and that's Joe Biden, and that's Hunter Biden.
[Camerota:] Here's what Senator Lindsey Graham said last night about this after speaking to President Trump.
[Sen. Lindsey Graham,  Senate Foreign Relations Committee:] I just left President Trump. He's mad as hell that they would do this to him, and now deny him his day in court. The reason they are denying him his day in court is because they know their case sucks.
[Camerota:] What day in court? He wasn't participating. Was President Trump going to show up at a Senate trial?
[Honig:] No way. No way he was going to show up. But look, he was going to send his legal team there. He declined to show up in the House but he would absolutely have to show up in the Senate.
[Camerota:] He would. So they would have to participate on some level in the Senate?
[Berman:] That's the answer is yes. The answer here is
[Camerota:] Wow.
[Berman:] Looks like yes.
[Camerota:] Any time I say something brilliant, this goes off. So they couldn't just stonewall the way they did in the House. They would have to show up?
[Jarrett:] They could still, but unprecedented, again.
[Honig:] They could. To me, it's crazy that we're arguing about, should there be witnesses at a trial? Call me old-fashioned, but isn't that what trials are all about? The precedent here, I learned from Professor Gerhardt yesterday, 40- something witnesses in Andrew Johnson's trial, three in Bill Clinton's trial, and the Bill Clinton trial, the record was set. It was in a box. You had the Starr Report. Here there's so many unanswered questions, and we're thinking of seriously having a trial with no witnesses? I don't know how that's palatable.
[Berman:] And 71 percent of Americans in our poll say that they want to hear witnesses in the Senate trial. And what was it, 64 percent of Republicans?
[Camerota:] Republicans, sure.
[Berman:] So if the fight is about hearing witnesses, at least as a matter of public opinion right now, the Democrats are winning. Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia has come out and said he wants witnesses, which is interesting, because he could be someone who said who knows how he could vote in the end here. But he wants witnesses. And then this puts pressure on those four to six Republican senators like Susan Collins, Cory Gardner. They're going to be asked, what do you want to see happen now?
[Jarrett:] And they have to listen to their constituents, I think, over the holidays. They could potentially get pushback on this and say, wait a minute. It's one thing, we're in defense of the president here, but have no witnesses whatsoever? And I think that's sort of the thorn in McConnell's side. He doesn't care what Nancy Pelosi is doing, but if he gets even a handful of those vulnerable Republicans to say, wait a minute, we have to hear from a few people, I think that's where things get interesting.
[Golodryga:] And the reason you have 71 percent of Americans agreeing that there should be witnesses is because this isn't asking for too much, right? It's not an over the top request to have the people who have firsthand knowledge of what transpired as witnesses in this trial. And I think Republicans and Mitch McConnell need to just come to a conclusion as to whether this is a trial or this is a political process, because he's weighing both all the time, and it's one or the other, but it can't be both.
[Camerota:] Let's talk about this really interesting piece in the "Washington Post" overnight. Journalists, as you all know, as well as pundits and regular people, have tried to figure out where the Ukraine conspiracy theory began, what the genesis of this was that planted it in President Trump's head. Was it Rudy Giuliani? Well, according to the "Washington Post," it was a different source. It was Vladimir Putin. So here's they basically say after meeting privately in July, 2017, the Russian president Vladimir Putin, at the Group of 20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, Trump grew more insistent that Ukraine worked to defeat him according to multiple foreign officials familiar with his assertions. And as you know, he meets privately one on one with Putin away from transcribers. And go on. You had
[Berman:] The money quote from the "Washington Post" is this. "One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because, quote, "Putin told me."
[Camerota:] And there it is.
[Golodryga:] So we spend, I think, too much time focusing on Putin's role in all of this, because it's not really from any one of his predecessors, right. Every single Russian leader, Soviet leader, wanted to interfere in U.S. elections at some point, and was transmitting false tales about what was happening in the U.S. and wanted to cause discord and chaos internally. The difference is you finally have a president who is willing to buy into that, who trusts this person. Why, we don't yet know. But it's still baffling to me that we continue to hear these stories years after this took place, that these are his top advisers who are now coming out off the record and saying here's something that should have set off alarm bells internally and, I think, nationwide in real time. It's really telling. And we need to stop normalizing this buddy-buddy relationship, because there's nothing normal about it, and it's a real harm to U.S. national security.
[Honig:] One of the things that I see here that I think we've seen time and again is you want your decisionmakers, you want your president, your government to take the facts and reach a conclusion. And here it seems they're doing is they start with the conclusion. What do we want the end story to be, and then backfill in the facts here.
[Berman:] Can I tell you one other reason how these two discussions we've had play in together and why Republicans have told me over the last month, one of the things that concerns them as there's a delay in the Senate trial is they just don't know what's around the corner. They don't know what new information can come out. They don't know what newspaper is going to publish which finding.
[Camerota:] This person, this former senior White House official, might this person come forward and explain the conversations that they directly heard?
[Berman:] There's the fear of the unknown, and not just that. There's the expectation, Laura, among some Republicans is that there is more out there. Whether or not we find out what it is, there's more.
[Jarrett:] We haven't heard from John Bolton. This is a key fact witness, right. We haven't heard from Mulvaney. We haven't heard from the people who were in the room for some of these conversations. Pompeo. We could name a dozen people who were present for some troubling episodes who we haven't heard from. And there are plenty of former officials who are obviously privy to a lot of this information and willing to talk. But it's amazing that the "Washington Post" publishes that article. Obviously, it's eye-popping. But Fiona Hill testified. We spent a lot of time trying to disabuse of this notion and this conspiracy theory. A lot of this is out there not from anonymous sources on background, but public testimony.
[Golodryga:] And every single Republican, almost every single Republican knows better. So anybody that's defending the president's argument that it's now Ukraine, they know that's not the case. And they should be equally alarmed.
[Honig:] To Laura's point, if there's a real trial lawyer on that team, what they are telling Donald Trump is trial is unpredictable, it's dynamic. You are at risk as long as this trial is open. Who knows who could come forward? I've seen all sorts of surprises happen midtrial for good, for bad. So as long as this is an open matter, who knows what could happen?
[Camerota:] And Elie, are there still court cases that might compel John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney to come forward, or were those retracted? Where are we with those witnesses?
[Honig:] There is no case on Bolton and Mulvaney. That's essentially become article two here of the articles of impeachment, obstruction of Congress. The only one that's still alive is Don McGahn, which is now at the court of appeals, but it would take a miracle for that case to be finished with the court of appeals, potentially the Supreme Court on the same timeframe. And remember, Mueller and McGahn is not even part of the articles, so I don't see that breaking the logjam.
[Berman:] Bianna, Elie, Laura, great to have you here. Happy holidays to everybody. I know it's dangerous to say that. I keep poking the bear by saying "happy holidays."
[Camerota:] It's fine. Who is the bear?
[Berman:] "Happy holidays" is very controversial. You're not supposed to say "happy holidays."
[Camerota:] But there are two holidays right now, so I think that it's fine to use the plural.
[Berman:] One would think you could say it, but it upsets a lot of people to say "happy holidays."
[Camerota:] We'll see what Twitter does to you.