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A Senate vote to end President Donald Trump’s impeachment proceedings without calling witnesses should be considered “half a trial,” the president’s former chief of staff John Kelly said Friday.

“In my view, they kind of leave themselves open to a lot of criticism,” Kelly said in an interview with NJ Advance Media in advance of his Feb. 12 appearance at Drew University’s Drew Forum speaker series at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.

“It seems it was half a trial,” Kelly said.

Kelly said he believed former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s assertion that Trump withheld congressionally approved aid to Ukraine to pressure that government into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Bolton, who made the claims in an unpublished book reported by the New York Times, was “a copious note taker” and was “an honest guy and an honorable guy,” Kelly said.

Kelly, whose wife Karen grew up in Teaneck, made his comments just hours before the Senate’s planned vote Friday on whether to call witnesses in its trial of the president.

Trump refused to allow his aides and refused to turn over documents to the House, which last month made him only the third president ever to be impeached.

Three-quarters of U.S. voters in a Quinnipiac University poll released this week supported calling witnesses in the Senate trial, with just 20 percent opposed.

“If I was advising the United States Senate, I would say, 'If you don’t respond to 75 percent of the American voters and have witnesses, it’s a job only half done,” he said. “You open yourself up forever as a Senate that shirks its responsibilities.”

Kelly is a retired Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s secretary of homeland security under before becoming White House chief of staff from July 2017 to the end of 2018.

Once the impeachment trial ends, Kelly said, Trump should invite the congressional leaders of both parties to the White House and move ahead on issues such as infrastructure.

“If I was there, I’d recommend the president have leadership over and say, ‘OK, now that this is behind us, let’s talk,’” Kelly said. “We can maybe take a breath over the weekend and make a commitment to each other. It would be such a wonderful outreach.”.

But with the next presidential election just 10 months away, “it’s unlikely to happen,” he said.