“I wonder why the House did not put that into the record and it’s only now being revealed,” Collins said.
Parnas, however, did not relinquish the evidence until last week. When informed of this fact Collins asked, “Doesn’t that suggest that the House did an incomplete job, then?”
Collins’ statements about the Parnas documents caused the senator to become a trending topic on Twitter with most users disapproving of her apparent dismissal of this new evidence.
“The Parnas document dump happened yesterday and Susan Collins is blaming Democrats for not including it in their impeachment inquiry that ended in December,” tweeted political writer Brian Tyler Cohen. “For the umpteenth time, she’s the same as the rest of them.”
CNN commentator Keith Boykin said, “You can always count on Susan Collins to do the right thing…for Susan Collins.”
The DNC War Room, a Twitter feed associated with the Democratic National Committee, said “The House subpoenaed these documents way back in October. They were turned over this week because the judge in Parnas’s criminal case only just cleared him to do so. Susan Collins is falling in line behind Mitch McConnell, as usual, and engaging in Trump’s cover-up.”
Senator Collins’ Communication Director Annie Clark tweeted Wednesday that the point Collins was trying to make with her comments was that the House had “rushed its investigation.”
“This is false,” Clark tweeted in response to Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe’s comment that Collins’ statements were “ridiculous.”
“@SenatorCollins has made clear from the start that she is open to witnesses, documents, and other evidence,” Clark continued. “The point that she was making is that the House rushed its investigation and thus did not have access to these materials.”
Collins has indicated her openness to calling witnesses during the impeachment trial, but was not sure which ones. When asked by reporters Wednesday if she thought Hunter Biden should called to testify, she said, “How can I tell?”
“You’re asking me to pre-judge the evidence,” Collins said. “It’s clearly not the right time for us to judge which specific witnesses should be called.”
Collins told reporters Monday that she would not push to call witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial as she did during the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton until after the opening arguments have been heard.
“I would not be advocating for language to be included in the governing resolution if I did not anticipate at the end of hearing the case presented, and the Q and A, that there might not be a need for more information,” Collins said.
Collins, the most senior Republican woman in the U.S. Senate, is the chair of both the Senate Aging Committee and the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee. Collins also sits on the House Intelligence Committee.
