Just two days after he was acquitted of abuse of power charges, President Trump ousted two key impeachment witnesses on Friday: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman.Sondland, who had tied Trump to the pressure campaign against Ukraine at the heart of impeachment proceedings, announced he had been let go but gave no reason for his removal.“I was advised today that the President intends to recall me effective immediately as United States Ambassador to the European Union,” he said in a statement.That was only hours after Vindman was demonstratively marched out of the White House, along with his attorney brother, in what his lawyer described as retaliation “for telling the truth” during impeachment proceedings. Alexander Vindman Decries ‘Callow and Cowardly’ Attacks on Witnesses in Impeachment InquiryMany had expected Trump to exact vengeance following his impeachment acquittal. After all, it was only two weeks ago that Eric Ueland, Trump's legislative affairs director, had breezed past a group of reporters and was quoted saying, “I can't wait for the revenge.”And Trump allies were quick to gloat, with the president’s son facetiously thanking Rep. Adam Schiff for helping to identify who in the administration “needed to be fired” through the impeachment process.Still, some U.S. officials were left alarmed by the moves.“It’s incredibly disturbing that the president is unaware of his Constitutional powers until his corrupt intent is clear,” a State Department official told The Daily Beast. “All Americans should easily recognize at this point his personnel decisions have nothing to do with valid policy decisions for the public good and are only about the zero sum game of his own personal power interests.”The firings come two days after the Senate acquitted Trump of coercing Ukraine into investigating the president’s political rivals, rejecting articles of impeachment approved by the House.Both Vindman and Sondland had provided crucial testimony during House hearings, with Vindman recalling his shock when he said he heard Trump pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and Biden’s son, Hunter. Vindman, a war hero who served as director of European affair on the NSC, testified that he revealed his concerns about Trump’s request to other NSC officials. Trump had foreshadowed Vindman’s departure on Friday, telling reporters that he “wasn’t happy” with the colonel. “You think I’m supposed to be happy with him? I’m not.” Sondland’s departure comes more than two months after his stunning testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee, when he singled out top Trump officials and said they were all in on the campaign to coerce Ukraine to conduct politically motivated investigations pushed by Trump. Here Are All the People Sondland Just Threw Under the BusSondland told the panel that senior players including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Vice President Mike Pence knew about his attempt to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to make a public commitment to investigate a conspiracy theory around 2016 election and the gas company Burisma. Sondland stopped short of saying the president directed him personally, instead saying he was following orders from Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who the president had directed Sondland, U.S. Envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to deal with on Ukraine. Two officials who spoke to The Daily Beast on Friday night said they had been expecting Sondland’s removal for months. The EU Ambassador had been absent for meetings and conference calls he had in the past frequented.One former official said Sondland’s departure was not surprising and that the former ambassador had indicated privately that he knew he was on his way out. His ouster came as much of Trumpworld seemed to be cheering on the president’s decision to force Vindman out, urging him not to stop at the Vindman brothers and to keep “draining the swamp.” Donald Trump Jr. reacted to the firings with mockery, suggested on Twitter that the impeachment trial had actually done the president a favor by “unearthing who all needed to be fired.” The Twitter account for Trump’s re-election campaign also appeared to justify the firings, retweeting old tweets accusing Vindman of “colluding” in the impeachment “coup” and “leaking” information to the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the impeachment trial. The State Department official said Sondland’s ouster was even more concerning than Vindman’s.“Regardless of our concerns with Sondland’s initial nomination, he was a duly sworn Ambassador and even more so than LTC Vindman, this is retributive,” the official said. “I think we were anticipating that after the president was acquitted he was going to purge the people he couldn’t before because it was too politically costly beforehand,” another U.S. official said. “Plus, what if these people had known something that they had not yet publicized?” The official added that Sondland’s departure came as more of a shock since he hadn’t been as critical in his testimony as Vindman. Vindman, the official said, seemed to have “no political leanings” when he started at the National Security Council and was devoted to serving the president. “I think the idea that they had to fire him and not let him leave quietly is the big dramatic signal. The Secret Service comes in and walks you out. It was meant to humiliate him,” the official said. A Republican Senate aide told The Daily Beast there was nothing unseemly about the Friday firings.“This has nothing to do with loyalty or with questioning their patriotism. The president is entitled to his own staffing selections,” the aide said. “And if there’s one thing we learned through the past six months, it’s that there are a number of staff who think it is their job, not the president’s job, to set foreign policy.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said Friday he does not support a state lawmaker's push to censure U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney over his vote to convict in the president's impeachment trial.

Herbert, a Republican, said in a statement Romney voted in accordance with his conscience ...

President Donald Trump on Friday criticized Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia for voting guilty on two articles of impeachment, aiming to weaken the senator's political standing in a state Trump carried by a whopping 42 percentage points in 2016. Trump tweeted that he was “very surprised & disappointed" with Manchin's votes. Trump asserted in a subsequent tweet that Manchin was “just a puppet" for the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate.

President Donald Trump lashed out at yet another impeachment foe on Friday, turning his ire to Sen. Joe Manchin and calling the West Virginia Democrat a “puppet” of his party after he voted in favor of removing Trump from office earlier this week.

"I was very surprised & disappointed that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia voted against me on the Democrat’s totally partisan Impeachment Hoax,” Trump said in a pair of tweets, asserting that nevertheless, “no President has done more for the great people of West Virginia than me (Pensions), and that will always continue.”

Trump’s attack came shortly after Manchin appeared on Fox News to defend his vote to convict the president on both articles of impeachment. The red-state Democrat, easily among the most conservative in his caucus, had kept mum on which way he planned to vote until the last minute on Wednesday.

But he told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer that while he “labored over” the vote, calling it “most difficult decision” he’d had to make in nearly four decades of public life, the evidence against Trump was “overwhelming.”

“I said if I can come home and explain it, I can vote for it. I can explain this vote. It might not be popular in my state but we will see. History will tell. The bottom line is the evidence was very clear,” Manchin said, adding that he was hoping the chamber would vote to hear from new witnesses or admit new evidence that could have tilted the case more clearly in one way or the other.

"I was hoping, I truly was hoping that we would see evidence, that we would see new witnesses. Maybe he could get some doubt or clarity. What we saw was overwhelming," he said.

Ultimately, Manchin concluded, the allegation that Trump asked Ukraine's inexperienced president for investigations for his own political benefit proved to be "just an affront that I couldn't get over."

He said he was also put off by a controversial argument made by one of Trump's lawyers about the expansive powers of the presidency.

Trump on Friday also kept up his battering of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who was the lone Republican in either chamber of Congress to split from his party and vote to convict Trump.

Romney, in an emotional floor speech announcing his decision, said he leaned heavily on his faith to guide him. For the last 24 hours, Trump has mocked that explanation, claiming Friday that “every Republican Senator except Romney, many highly religious people, all very smart, voted against the Impeachment Hoax.”

But Romney, like Manchin on Friday, insisted that he’d struggled greatly with his decision to vote for Trump’s removal, and both senators also said that they’d voted to hear from new witnesses with the hope that maybe one of those witnesses could clear Trump.

Since Wednesday’s acquittal, Trump has set out on a vindictive victory lap.

He railed against Democrats, Romney and administration officials who testified against him in a freewheeling White House address on Thursday, and on Friday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, one of the key impeachment witnesses, was pushed out of his post at the National Security Council.

In his tweets Friday, Trump praised Manchin’s fellow senator from West Virginia, Republican Shelley Moore Capito. Capito, Trump wrote, “was all in (a great person). I was told by many that Manchin was just a puppet for Schumer & Pelosi. That’s all he is!”

Capito had appeared on Fox News the day before, where she implied Manchin only voted against Trump because he had a “noose” around his neck controlled by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Manchin took offense to Capito’s assertion, pointing out that he breaks with his party quite frequently, including on several high-profile votes.

“My goodness,” Manchin exclaimed. “I've taken some tough votes that are very unpopular with the caucus and I'm sure that Schumer and everybody else might not have been happy with it but it's a vote that I can live with.”