Attorneys begin defense of president
They say Democrats interfering in election
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s lawyers plunged into his impeachment trial defense Saturday by accusing Democrats of striving to overturn the 2016 election, arguing that the investigation of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine has not been a fact-finding mission but rather a politically motivated effort to drive him from the White House.
“They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone told senators. “And we can’t allow that to happen.”
The Trump legal team’s arguments in the rare Saturday session were aimed at rebutting two articles of impeachment that charge the president with abusing his power when he asked Ukraine to investigate a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and then obstructing Congress as it tried to investigate.
The lawyers are mounting a wide-ranging, aggressive defense that asserts an expansive view of presidential powers and portrays Trump as besieged by political opponents determined to ensure he won’t be reelected in November.
“They’re asking you to tear up all the ballots across this country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people,” Cipollone said.
“We can’t allow that to happen. It would violate our Constitution. It would violate our history. It would violate our obligations to the future,” Cipollone told the
Senate. “And most importantly, it would violate the sacred trust that the American people have placed in you.”
The defense team made clear that it intends to paint the impeachment case as a continuation of the investigations that have shadowed the president since before he took office — including one into allegations of Russian election interference on his behalf. Trump attorney Jay Sekulow suggested Democrats were investigating the president over Ukraine simply because they couldn’t bring him down in the Russia inquiry.
“That — for this,” said Sekulow, holding up a copy of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which Sekulow accused Democrats of attempting to “relitigate.” That report detailed ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia but did not allege a criminal conspiracy to tip the election.
Concluding a marathon week of presentations before the Senate, Trump’s lawyers began speaking mid-morning and ended by noon, allowing senators to return home for a short period before the trial resumes Monday afternoon.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and a two-thirds vote would be required for conviction and removal from office. Republican senators said Saturday that the White House presentation had shredded the Democratic case.
Several of the senators shook hands with Trump’s lawyers after their presentation. The visitors galleries were filled with people watching the historic proceedings and the rare weekend session of the Senate.
Trump’s defense team followed three days of arguments from Democrats, who wrapped up Friday by warning that Trump will persist in abusing his power and endangering American democracy unless Congress intervenes to remove him before the 2020 election. They also implored Republicans to allow new testimony to be heard before senators render a verdict.
In making their case that Trump invited Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election, the seven Democratic prosecutors peppered their arguments with video clips, email correspondence and lessons in American history. At stake, they said, is the security of U.S. elections, America’s place in the world and checks on presidential power.
On Saturday morning, House managers made the procession across the Capitol to deliver the 28,578-page record of their case to the Senate.
TRUMP’S DEFENSE
The defense team accused Democrats of cherrypicking evidence and omitting information favorable to the president to cast in a nefarious light the actions that Trump was legitimately empowered to take. They focused particular scorn on the House’s lead manager, Rep. Adam Schiff, in trying to undercut his credibility.
Schiff later told reporters: “When your client is guilty, when your client is dead to rights, you don’t want to talk about your client; you want to attack the prosecution.”
The Trump team had teased the idea that it would draw attention to Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his father was vice president. But neither Biden was a focus of Saturday arguments.
Instead, Trump’s team argued that there was no evidence that Trump made security aid contingent on Ukraine announcing an investigation into the Bidens and that Ukraine didn’t even know that the money had been paused until shortly before it was released.
Trump had reason to be concerned about corruption in Ukraine, and the aid was ultimately released, they said.
The lawyers also suggested Trump was justified in doubting the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia, not Ukraine, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
In taking this approach, the lawyers landed repeatedly on themes that matter to Trump, including what he has described as his “perfect” July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Mueller’s report, and omissions and errors by the FBI in documents submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the election.
Sekulow argued that the president had reason not to “blindly trust some of the advice he was being given” by intelligence officials.
Focusing on the July 25 call, deputy White House counsel Michael Purpura suggested that witnesses who expressed concerns about it were politically motivated. He said Trump’s conversation with Zelenskiy reflected the administration’s “legitimate concerns about corruption” in Ukraine.
Purpura also spent considerable time arguing that Ukraine did not learn about the hold on military aid until late August.
“There can’t be a threat without the person knowing he’s being threatened,” he said.
“Most of the Democratic witnesses have never spoken to the president at all, let alone about Ukraine security assistance,” Purpura added.
Purpura told the senators that the July 25 call was consistent with the president’s concerns about corruption. He said everyone knows that when Trump asked Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” with an investigation, he meant the U.S., not himself.
“This entire impeachment process is about the house managers’ insistence that they are able to read everybody’s thoughts,” Sekulow said. “They can read everybody’s intention. Even when the principal speakers, the witnesses themselves, insist that those interpretations are wrong.”
Defense lawyers say Trump was a victim not only of Democratic rage but also of overzealous agents and prosecutors. Sekulow cited mistakes made by the FBI in its surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide in the now-concluded Russia investigation, and he referred to the multimillion-dollar cost of that inquiry.
“You cannot simply decide this case in a vacuum,” he said.
RAISING DOUBTS
The second part of the defense’s presentation sought to raise doubts about the legal and constitutional validity of the impeachment inquiry. Deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin also mentioned the anonymous whistleblower, whose report helped launch the impeachment inquiry, and the House’s decision not to investigate that person.
“Motivations, bias, reasons for wanting to bring this complaint could be relevant,” Philbin said. “But there wasn’t any inquiry into that.”
In several moments, Trump’s lawyers criticized Schiff.
Philbin noted that Schiff had once mischaracterized his staff’s dealings with the whistleblower. Purpura also showed a video clip of Schiff parodying dialogue from the July 25 call during a House hearing, a dramatic embellishment that Trump and his allies say obliterates Schiff’s credibility.
“We can shrug it off and say we were making light or a joke. But that was in a hearing in the United States House of Representatives discussing the removal of the president of the United States from office,” Purpura said. “There are very few things, if any, that can be as grave and as serious.”
From the White House, Trump tweeted his response: “Any fair minded person watching the Senate trial today would be able to see how unfairly I have been treated and that this is indeed the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax that EVERYBODY, including the Democrats, truly knows it is.”
Senators already allied with Trump declared the presentation a slam-dunk.
“In two hours, the White House counsel entirely shredded the case by the House managers,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told reporters, echoing several other Republicans who used a form of the word shred to characterize the effect of the lawyers’ arguments.
But moderate Republican senators — whose votes will determine whether additional evidence is sought in the trial — did not share detailed opinions on the presentation or the possible need for witnesses.
“I think it’s very likely I’ll be in favor of witnesses, but I haven’t made a decision finally yet, and I won’t until both sides’ opening arguments are done,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told reporters on Capitol Hill.
“I thought for the most part, the House managers were effective, and I thought the president’s attorneys this morning were very effective,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told CBS News.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, declined to comment when approached by The Washington Post.
Some moderate Democratic senators said witnesses are necessary to the process.
“I thought they did a good job in presenting the defense for the president,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. “[But] the most important thing I took away from today was they made very clear that there’s not one witness that we’ve heard from … that had direct contact with the president.”
Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., said he was “stunned” that Trump’s lawyers argued at one point that cross-examination is essential to due process, even as the White House bars witnesses from testifying on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
“The American people deserve the truth. They deserve the whole truth,” Jones said. “We’re not getting it.”
One of the president’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, is expected to argue next week that an impeachable offense requires criminal-like conduct. Sekulow also said the Bidens would be discussed in the days ahead.
The Senate is heading next week toward a pivotal vote on Democratic demands for testimony from top Trump aides, including acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, who refused to appear before the House. It would take four Republican senators to join the Democratic minority to seek witnesses.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican ally of Trump’s, said he thought the legal team had successfully poked holes in the Democrats’ case and that the Democrats had “told a story probably beyond what the market would bear.”
He said he had spoken to Trump last week, when the president was leaving Davos, Switzerland.
Asked whether Trump had any observations on the trial, Graham replied: “Yeah, he hates it.”
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Lisa Mascaro, Zeke Miller, Mary Clare Jalonick, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly and Padmananda Rama of The Associated Press; and by Elise Viebeck, Mike DeBonis, Rachael Bade, Colby Itkowitz, John Wagner and Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post.