Senators keep asking impeachment hypotheticals about Mitt Romney right in front of Mitt Romney

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published 29 January 2020

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) probably doesn't need a lot of reminders about the 2012 election, but he's getting them anyway.

Romney on Wednesday was at the center of some hypothetical scenarios drawn up during the Senate's impeachment trial. First, the House's lead prosecutor Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) posed a scenario in which former President Barack Obama was caught asking former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev for an investigation into Romney — Obama's 2012 presidential challenger — in exchange for military aid against Ukraine. He was trying to get senators to think about what the Republican response would be in a situation mirroring the exchange between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

Afterwards, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) pulled a similar trick, submitting a question to Schiff about whether Obama would have had the authority to ask for an investigation into Romney's son if he was being paid by a corrupt Russian company and "Romney had acted to benefit that company." In that instance, Romney and his son are playing the role of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, while the Russian company is a stand in for Ukrainian gas company, Burisma (there's no evidence the elder Biden did anything to benefit Burisma.)

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All this, of course, was said right in front of Romney, who despite losing the bid for the presidency, has since worked his way back into politics as a senator. The former Republican nominee, for what it's worth, was reportedly a good sport about the whole thing. Tim O'Donnell

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.