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Pelosi expects House vote Wednesday to send articles of impeachment to Senate

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she expects the House to vote Wednesday to send articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Republican-controlled Senate, weeks after the articles passed the House in a vote that fell mostly along party lines.

"The President and the Senators will be held accountable," Pelosi said Tuesday in a statement. "The American people deserve the truth, and the Constitution demands a trial."

Pelosi said the House will hold a vote Wednesday to name impeachment managers, the next necessary step in the process. The impeachment managers will be tasked with prosecuting the case against Trump.

She said the House will also hold a vote that day on whether to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate.

The House voted last month to impeach Trump on charges of abuse and obstruction, but since then Pelosi has resisted calls to release the articles to the Senate. The California Democrat has said that members of her party need more information on the proposed rules of the Senate trial to inform her decision on who to put forth as impeachment managers.

“I’ll send them over when I’m ready. And that will probably be soon,” Pelosi told reporters last week. "We want to see what (Senate Republicans are) willing to do and the manner in which they will do it."

If the House votes to send articles to the Senate on Wednesday, the impeachment trial could soon begin, Politico reported.

"My guess is we'll observe the (Martin Luther King Jr.) holiday and be back the day after," Senate Majority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., told the news site.

House Democrats launched the impeachment inquiry after learning of a whistleblower complaint filed in August by an official concerned about Trump’s attempts to get Ukrainian officials to investigate former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

In a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked his counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden while holding up military aide for Ukraine. A Ukrainian gas company had hired Hunter Biden when his father was vice president and the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.