Trump charges ‘unlawful’
Senate trial set to begin tomorrow
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s legal defence team strenuously denied on Saturday that he had committed impeachable acts, denouncing the charges against him as a “brazen and unlawful” attempt to cost him reelection as House Democrats laid out in meticulous detail their case that he should be removed from office.
In the first legal filings for the Senate impeachment trial that opens in earnest tomorrow, the duelling arguments from the White House and the House impeachment managers previewed a politically charged fight over Mr Trump’s fate, unfolding against the backdrop of the presidential election campaign.
They presented the legal strategies both sides are likely to employ during the third presidential impeachment trial in American history. They also vividly illustrated how the proceeding is almost certain to rekindle feuding over the 2016 election that has barely subsided during Mr Trump’s tenure, and reverberate — whether he is convicted or acquitted — in an even more brutal electoral fight in November.
In a 46-page trial memorandum and an additional 60-page statement of facts, House impeachment managers asserted that beginning in the spring, Mr Trump undertook a corrupt campaign to enlist a foreign government to help him win the 2020 election. He did so, Democrats argued, by pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations of his political rivals, withholding as leverage vital military aid and a White House meeting for the country’s president.
The president then sought to conceal those actions from Congress, they said, posing “a serious danger to our constitutional checks and balances” by ordering administration officials not to testify or turn over documents requested by a House impeachment inquiry.
“President Trump’s conduct is the framers’ worst nightmare,” wrote the seven Democratic managers, led by Rep. Adam Schiff of California.
In a six-page filing formally responding to the House impeachment charges submitted shortly after and filled with barbs against House Democrats, Mr Trump’s lawyers denounced the impeachment case as legally invalid and driven purely by a desire to hurt Mr Trump in the 2020 election.
“The articles of impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” they said in the response, which was Mr Trump’s first legal submission in the impeachment proceeding, ahead of a fuller brief that is due today. “This is a unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away.”
The president’s lawyers did not deny any of the facts underlying Democrats’ charges, conceding what considerable evidence and testimony in the House has shown: that he withheld US$391 million (11.8 billion baht) in aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine and asked the country’s president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
But they said Mr Trump broke no laws and was acting entirely appropriately and within his powers when he did so, echoing his repeated protestations of his own innocence. They argued that he was not seeking political advantage but working to root out corruption in Ukraine.
“President Trump categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation in both articles of impeachment,” wrote Pat A Cipollone, White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer.
The managers’ filing repeated many of the same arguments they laid out last fall in a report on the findings of their impeachment inquiry.