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In her request for extension, Mu\u00f1a said that fully complying with all requested changes within the 48 hours mandated by Impeachment Rule 9 is \u201csimply not feasible.\u201d <\/p>\n
Last Monday, Senate clerk Dolores S. Bermudes informed Mu\u00f1a that her office had identified numerous deficiencies in the official House Impeachment Record.<\/p>\n
The House Impeachment Record was transmitted to the office of the Senate clerk last March 24. Bermudes said that, pursuant to the Impeachment Rules, Mu\u00f1a has 48 hours, or yesterday, to correct the identified deficiencies.<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1a then wrote to Bermudes requesting an extension of 30 days to correct the deficiencies. Bermudes replied yesterday that she does not have the authority to consider or grant Mu\u00f1a\u2019s request, that it should be addressed to Hofschneider in accordance with the Impeachment Rules.<\/p>\n
The Senate clerk advised Mu\u00f1a that, at this point, the deadline to correct the deficiencies is still 48 hours from the date and time she received the letter, which is 4:54pm Wednesday, April 6.<\/p>\n
In her request for extension, Mu\u00f1a said notwithstanding the language in the Impeachment Rules that the Senate clerk \u201cshall promptly notify the House clerk,\u201d the Senate, with the assistance of Legislative Bureau staff, took 11 calendar days, or 264 hours, to produce a list of objections to the record.<\/p>\n
By contrast, Mu\u00f1a said, she only has 48 hours to correct these deficiencies, which would entail rearranging thousands of documents from dozens of disparate sources.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an unreasonable and unfair burden for me to complete within such a short time span. Further, I have concerns about some of the requested changes,\u201d Mu\u00f1a said.<\/p>\n
She said it would distort the nature of the record to rearrange documents within the tranches submitted to the House Judiciary and Governmental Operations Committee.<\/p>\n
For example, Mu\u00f1a said, the tranche of over 1,000 pages of documents related to travel authorizations subpoenaed from police officer Joey Cruz is not in chronological order because it was not submitted by Cruz in chronological order.<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1a also cited that some documents were scanned and entered into the record in the order in which they arrived, and were typically not arranged in any systematic order when provided to the House.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a mammoth task to organize these documents and compile them into a searchable record as we did, and I maintain that the record I transmitted on March 24, 2022, was in substantial compliance with [Impeachment] Rule 9,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Still, Mu\u00f1a said, she would be willing to undertake the challenge to make a good faith effort to correct the identified issues if given enough time and resources to do so. She said her office will endeavor to correct typographical errors, adjust the consecutive pagination of documents, and arrange documents in chronological order to the extent possible.<\/p>\n
In denying Mu\u00f1a\u2019s request for extension, Hofschneider said there is no provision in the Senate Rules of Impeachment that permit the extension of this deadline. Hofschneider said the House has been given ample time to provide a record organized in the manner prescribed by the Rules of Impeachment.<\/p>\n
The Senate president said t<\/p>\n
To imply by Muna\u2019s letter that the Senate staff has taken an inordinate time to return the disorganized record to Mu\u00f1a, is, \u201cfrankly, an insult\u201d at a time when the House clerk is requesting the Senate\u2019s consideration, Hofschneider said.<\/p>\n
He pointed out that the Senate Rules of Impeachment were presented and made available to the public last Feb. 28. He said that last March 3, the Senate voted and passed the Rules, and the House was required to provide the Impeachment Record by March 17. He said the deadline was extended at Mu\u00f1a\u2019s request last March 24.<\/p>\n
He said a further extension was available under Rule 9, which was not requested.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn all, the House of Representatives was fully aware of the simple and easy-to-follow format required of the impeachment record for 25 days, 19 days of which were regular workdays,\u201d Hofschneider said.<\/p>\n
He said those rules required the impeachment record to be organized by three very simple concepts\u2014consecutive pagination, a table of contents, and organized first by Article of Impeachment and second by chronological order.<\/p>\n
The Senate president said Mu\u00f1a seems to find the organization by chronological order to be the most objectionable. Unfortunately, Hofschneider pointed out, the record as provided listed documents that were not present, had entire sections of documents that bore no page numbers, and seemed to be missing pages altogether.<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps if the documents had been organized chronologically prior to being paginated, it would have eliminated these more serious problems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saying she was only given 48 hours to correct the deficiencies the Senate clerk had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":365675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-365892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}