Trump team touts debunked claims, calls trial hellish
President Trump’s lawyers spent their first full round of impeachment trial arguments Monday pushing the same dubious Ukraine claims that got the commander-in-chief impeached in the first place while accusing Democrats of putting their client through biblical agony.
“Like war, impeachment is hell — or, at least, presidential impeachment is hell,” said former Clinton independent counsel Kenneth Starr (inset), a newly minted member of Trump’s legal team. “It is filled with acrimony and it divides the country like nothing else. Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment understand that in a deep and personal way.”
Democrats found Starr’s laments hypocritical, as he was one of the driving forces behind President Bill Clinton’s impeachment on charges that he lied about a sex scandal.
“It was really incredibly surreal to see him talking about impeachment as something that should be done with solemnity,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said.
And as Starr complained about Democrats splitting the country in half, Trump’s other lawyers fulfilled the president’s craving for a nationally televised partisan smear of Joe Biden — this one being delivered by Americans from the Senate floor instead of by Ukrainians in Kiev.
Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general with deep ties to the Trump family, maintained it wasn’t without reason that the president pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.
Bondi played a 2018 video clip circulated in right-wing media of Biden recalling how he as vice president convinced Ukraine’s government to fire Viktor Shokin, the country’s former top prosecutor.
She suggested Biden only did so because Shokin was at the time “investigating Burisma,” a Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden used to sit.
“Now, the House managers might say without evidence that everything we just have said has been debunked, that the evidence points entirely and unequivocally in the other direction,” Bondi said. “That is a distraction.”
But despite Bondi’s claims, just about her entire spiel has been debunked.
First off, Ukrainian officials have said the Burisma investigation was inactive at the time Biden pushed for Shokin’s removal.
Furthermore, it wasn’t just Biden who wanted Shokin gone.
Several European governments, the International Monetary Fund, Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and — notably — congressional Republicans in the U.S. advocated for Shokin to be ousted over concerns that he was looking the other way at criminal activity while possibly trying to cover up his own alleged misdeeds.
But many Republicans swallowed the Trump team’s Biden claims whole.
“There was overwhelming evidence on the face of it of potential corruption,” said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “And any president is justified and indeed has a responsibility to investigate serious allegations of corruption. That is the central issue before this Senate.”
About midway through Monday’s session, GOP senators took a dinner break behind closed doors to munch on Chick-fil-A and talk about the trial so far.
But Trump’s impeachment defense team was only getting started with the conspiracy theory mongering.
Jane Raskin, another Trump confidant tapped to the team, was tasked with perpetuating the other baseless claim the president wanted Ukraine to investigate — that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to hurt him and help Hillary Clinton.
Raskin defended Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, saying he had uncovered information of “Ukrainian election interference to defend his client” and that he did so “vigorously, relentlessly and publicly.”