President Donald Trump's lawyers laced into the House's impeachment case Saturday, opening their defense with pointed — and at times personal — efforts to seed doubt in GOP senators’ minds about Democrats’ push to remove Trump from office.
Over the course of a swift, two-hour session, Trump's top lawyer Pat Cipollone and his deputy Michael Purpura repeatedly sought to poke holes in the evidence that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals.
They contended that central witnesses in the House's impeachment hearings based their assessments on "presumptions" and "guesswork" rather than knowledge of Trump's intentions. They also argued that the words Trump spoke on his July 25 call to Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, conveyed no pressure — and that Ukrainians never publicly expressed any.
Cipollone launched the defense by suggesting that Democrats omitted crucial contextual evidence that paint Trump's actions in a less incriminating light. "They didn't tell you that," was Cipollone’s repeated refrain as he suggested that Trump expressed genuine concern about corruption — and complaints that Europe wasn't doing its part to support Ukraine — when he spoke to Zelensky.
"They have the burden of proof and they have not come close to meeting it," Cipollone said.
Trump's attorneys also went directly after Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrats’ lead impeachment manager.
In Purpura's initial comments, he played footage of Schiff paraphrasing Trump’s July 25 call during a congressional hearing last year. Schiff had said he was parodying the president by filling in sinister inferences, but Trump has fixated on the episode to suggest Schiff has tried to defraud the public about the nature of the call.
Trump's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow also linked Democrats' case against Trump to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which he said unfairly dogged Trump for much of his presidency.
Unmentioned in the first hours of the trial was Joe Biden, who Trump asked Zelensky to investigate during their July 25 call, a request that Democrats said amounted to a violation of Trump's oath of office — using his power to obtain a personal, political benefit. Biden is a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.
But Sekulow has foreshadowed that Biden will be a feature of the defense.
“Believe me, you'll hear about that issue,” Jay Sekulow, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, told reporters Friday in the Capitol during brief remarks where he previewed how the president’s legal team planned to use its allotted 24 hours of time to air a long list of familiar Trump grievances, including unsubstantiated charges of corruption against Biden.
Trump’s Senate trial revolves around an abuse of power charge from the Democrat-controlled House — that he pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Biden and other political adversaries, in part by withholding $391 million dollars in military aid. The House also impeached Trump for obstructing their investigation into the alleged scheme.
The Trump team’s initial volley made no mention of the central witnesses Democrats said could conclusively confirm or rebut their case but were blocked by Trump. Democrats say that the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly supports their charges even without additional testimony, but that the Senate should demand those additional witnesses if they have any doubts.
Over three days this week, Democrats laid out a voluminous case against the president, and concluded by calling him an ongoing and “imminent threat” to national security who is likely to continually attempt to corrupt the 2020 election to his benefit. Schiff described Trump as a willing vessel for Russian propaganda aimed at hurting the U.S.-Ukraine alliance. And Democrats also sought to preemptively counter many of Trump’s anticipated attack lines.
The focus on Biden and Mueller is not the strategy most lawyers would take when a president’s job is on the line. But this is the Trump era and any norms from past impeachment fights appear to be out the window. More than anything, Trump’s lawyers are aiming to use their nationally-televised platform to stamp out any lingering consideration by a handful of Senate Republicans to join Democrats in demanding new witnesses and documents to aid their prosecution.
Whether that plan works remains to be seen -- a vote on the witness question looms next week and several GOP senators have suggested they’re still open-minded. Trump himself is a wildcard in that debate. He has at times demanded that Republicans call his own favored witnesses, including Biden, and at others has called for a swift rejection of Democrats’ case.
But Trump's lawyers appeared to clearly aim their remarks at those few undecided Republican senators. They suggested that Ukraine never learned about the hold on military aid before an Aug. 28 POLITICO article revealed it publicly. That's at odds with some witness testimony and public comments from a former Ukrainian official who said the hold was known within Ukraine but that officials were motivated to keep it hidden until the POLITICO story ran.
Trump's lawyers also noted that Ukrainian officials never expressed concerns about pressure from Trump. Schiff and Democrats suggested during their opening argument that it would have been unthinkable for Zelensky to call out Trump when Ukraine is dependent on the United States to fend off Russian aggression amid an active war.
Trump's attorneys intend to argue extensively — despite voluminous testimony to the contrary — that repeated calls for Ukraine to investigate Biden reflect a genuine concern about corruption rather than a politically motivated attempt to damage a rival.
They also contend that Biden sought the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, an energy company where Biden’s son, Hunter, was serving on the board of directors.
Democrats presented extensive evidence during the Senate trial that the Ukrainian prosecutor Biden and the Obama administration helped remove was an impediment to anti-corruption investigations. Rather, witness testimony collected by the House suggested that Trump seemed fixated on pushing a sham investigation into Biden in order to damage the former vice president’s political prospects headed into the 2020 Democratic nomination fight. Democrats also gathered extensive evidence to show that Trump privately professed no interest in anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and other countries.
The high-profile effort by Trump’s attorneys to delve into the Bidens is in many ways akin to the outcome Democrats sought to head off when they first began their impeachment investigation.
“What they hope to achieve in the Senate trial is what they couldn’t achieve through their scheme,” Schiff said Friday night. “It’s about completing the object of the scheme through other means -- through the means of this trial.”
On Friday, Sekulow said that House prosecutors “opened up the door” for the president’s lawyers to go on offense on Biden since they brought the topic up first — comments that mirror those of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
“I guess they figured that was their way of getting ahead of it,” Sekulow said.
Trump’s lawyers won’t just dwell on Biden. They also intend to make an extensive case that Democrats’ entire impeachment process must be discarded as invalid. Leaning on outside-the-mainstream constitutional theories, the Trump team has argued that the House's impeachment is “defective” because it didn't charge him with violating a criminal statute. And they dispute that Trump can be booted from office over a charge he rejected congressional subpoenas.
“This idea that you obstruct Congress by exercising ... constitutional privileges is absurd, absolutely absurd,” Sekulow said. “These are fundamentally important rights, the way our separation of powers works, under our form of government.”
Trump lamented on Twitter Friday morning that his impeachment defense team — recently restocked with legal heavyweights like former independent counsel Kenneth Starr and retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz — would kick off its presentation Saturday morning during the “Death Valley” of broadcast time slots.
But Sekulow downplayed the way the schedule worked out. He explained that the Senate asked Trump’s lawyers to only use a limited amount of time Saturday morning, which means they’ll just be previewing what will be a more substantive presentation starting Monday and potentially spilling into Tuesday.
“I’d call it a trailer,” Sekulow said. “Coming attractions.”
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