TRUMP PLANS ‘NO CRIME’ DEFENSE; DEMS CALL POSITION ‘ABSURDIST’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Sunday previewed their impeachment defense with the questionable assertion that the charges against him are invalid, adopting a position rejected by Democrats as “nonsense” as both sides sharpened their arguments for trial.
“Criminal-like conduct is required,” said Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional lawyer on Trump’s defense team. Dershowitz said he will be making the same argument to the Senate and if it prevails, there will be “no need” to pursue the witness testimony or documents that Democrats are demanding.
The argument is part of a multi-pronged strategy the president’s team is developing ahead of its impeachment trial brief, which is due Monday. Trump asserts that his Ukraine pressure was “perfect” and that he is the victim of a witch hunt.
But the “no crime, no impeachment” approach has been roundly dismissed by scholars and Democrats, who were fresh off a trial brief that called Trump’s behavior the “worst nightmare” of the country’s founders. In their view, the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is vague and open-ended in the Constitution and meant to encompass abuses of power that aren’t necessarily illegal.
The White House is pushing an “absurdist position,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead Democratic prosecutor of the impeachment case. “That’s the argument I suppose you have to make if the facts are so dead set against you.” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., another impeachment prosecutor, called it “arrant nonsense” and said evidence of Trump’s misconduct is overwhelming.
Behind the scenes Sunday, the seven
House managers were meeting on strategy with staff and shoring up which prosecutor will handle which parts of the case. They were expected to do a walk-through of the Senate chamber on Monday around lunchtime, according to multiple Democrats working on impeachment.
Even as he made the case for Trump’s acquittal, Dershowitz on Sunday distanced himself from the rest of Trump’s defense team and said he would merely speak about the Constitution at the trial.
“I’m a liberal Democrat . . . I’m here as a constitutional lawyer,” Dershowitz said. “I’m here to lend my expertise on that issue and that issue alone.”
Schiff slams intelligence agencies
Meanwhile, Schiff is accusing U.S. intelligence agencies of withholding documents from Congress on Ukraine that could be significant to the impeachment trial.
“They appear to be succumbing to pressure from the administration,” Schiff said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Schiff contended that the National Security Agency “in particular is withholding what are potentially relevant documents” to the case. He also said “there are signs that the CIA may be on the same tragic course.”
The intelligence community said it is working to respond to the committee’s requests.