WASHINGTON, D.C. - If Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown had his druthers, the U.S. Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump that started Tuesday would be handled very differently.

There’d be witnesses. It would all be done during the day. There’d be no media restrictions on coverage in the U.S. Capitol.

“Senator (Mitch) McConnell is simply rigging the system,” Brown said of the Senate Majority leader from Kentucky. “He keeps us in until two in the morning, but people stop watching... He’s taken the cameras out of the Senate Chamber because he doesn’t want the American public to see, in the dead of night, fundamentally what he’s doing, and we owe it to our country to do better than that.”

In an interview with Ohio reporters after the first day of a trial where Senators will decide the propriety of Trump’s request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate the family of a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, Brown said he was upset that a bloc of 53 Republican Senators continuously defeated Democratic requests that documents or witnesses be introduced into the record.

“These are people who were in the room, who could shed light, and they’re not never-Trumpers,” said Brown. “They are not anti-Trump, they are Trump employees in most cases ... I kept thinking, the whole night, why in a court of law, which what this fundamentally is, is the defense unwilling to allow witnesses to come in and say what really happened?”

He questioned what Republicans are hiding and who they’re afraid of.

WATCH: Mitch McConnell is rigging this trial, and history will not look kindly on it. We’ve got to fix this for the American people. pic.twitter.com/s0uKyOsXA3 — Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) January 22, 2020

“Of the 15 trials in the Senate in 200 some years, this is the first one witnesses will not be allowed," Brown fumed. "McConnell should be ashamed of himself, and I’m just shocked that the other 52, whether they’re terrified of McConnell, whether they’re afraid of the President’s criticism, whatever the reasons, I just can’t believe they did this. It is not a real trial, unless you have witnesses and evidence, and they don’t seem interested.”

As the trial kicked off on Tuesday, McConnell said that its structure would align with the first steps of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999. He said the Senate will consider whether to hear witnesses after opening arguments and questions from senators. He accused Senate Democrats of trying to precommit to seeking “specific witnesses and documents before senators had even heard opening arguments or even asked questions.”

In a separate media availability on Wednesday, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said Democrats were making “redundant motions, over and over again,” because they “view this as an opportunity to continue their partisan attacks on the president instead of focusing on the priorities of the American people.”

“We are going to give each side up to 24 hours to present their case,” said Cruz. “We are going to have up to 16 hours of questions from Senators and then we will have a vote on whether additional witnesses, additional documents are necessary. If the vote is ‘Yes,’ then this trial could extend for many weeks or even months. If the vote is ‘No,’ then what I think is likely is the Senate will vote to move to final judgment and it will end with an acquittal with each senator standing and voting guilty or not guilty."

Brown said McConnell wants the trial to be over quickly, with less information revealed to the public, to cover up Trump’s wrongdoing.

“The President blackmailed or bribed, choose your verb, the Ukrainian president for our president to get a personal political benefit,” said Brown. “And there’s a coverup here and a coverup is to shut down, to run a sham trial where people aren’t able to speak up that would be willing to if we subpoenaed them.”

Brown said he doesn’t think Democrats should negotiate to trade testimony from Hunter Biden for testimony by John Bolton. He described Republican requests for testimony by Biden as “a distraction” that’s “great for the Trump base.”

“The whole idea of the Biden family testifying is sort of ludicrous because the trial’s not about them, the trial’s about what happened, what did the President do when he was talking to President Zelensky, and what the President did afterwards.”

Brown said the impeachment trial has been unlike any other Senate proceeding he’s witnessed. Usually, Senators can come and go from its chambers during debates, but this time everyone sits silently at their seats during the whole proceeding.

“It’s a very somber, very sobering place to be,” said Brown. “I’ve never sat in the Senate when it’s like that.”

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