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Trump Team, Opening Defense, Accuses Democrats of Plot to Subvert Election
President Trump’s lawyers argued against his removal in the Senate impeachment trial, saying Democrats are “asking you to tear up all of the ballots” by convicting him of high crimes and misdemeanors.
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Trump Team Makes Its Impeachment Defense
The president’s legal team began its defense on Saturday after House managers finished their opening arguments pressing for President Trump to be removed from office.
We can talk about the process. We will talk about the law. But today, we are going to confront them on the merits of their argument. Now they have the burden of proof. And they have not come close to meeting it. And the fact that they came here for 24 hours and hid evidence from you is further evidence that they don’t really believe in the facts of their case — that this is, for all their talk about election interference, that they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history. And we can’t allow that to happen. This case is really not about presidential wrongdoing. This entire impeachment process is about the House managers’ insistence that they are able to read everybody’s thoughts, they can read everybody’s intention, even when the principal speakers, the witnesses themselves, insist that those interpretations are wrong. I am not going to continue to go over and over and over again the evidence that they did not put before you, because we would be here for a lot longer than 24 hours. But to say that the president of the United States did not, was not concerned about burden sharing, that he was not concerned about corruption in Ukraine — the facts from their hearing, the facts from their hearing establish exactly the opposite. I want to touch on one last point before I yield to one of my colleagues, and that relates to the whistleblower, the whistleblower who we haven’t heard that much about, who started all of this. The whistleblower — we know from the letter that the inspector general of the intelligence community sent that he thought that the whistleblower had political bias. We don’t know exactly what the political bias was, because the inspector general testified in the House committees in an executive session, and that transcript is still secret. It wasn’t transmitted up to the House Judiciary Committee. We haven’t seen it. We don’t know what’s in it. We don’t know what he was asked and what he revealed about the whistleblower. Now you would think that before going forward with an impeachment proceeding against the president of the United States that you would want to find out something about the complainant that had started all of it, because motivations, bias, reasons for wanting to bring this complaint could be relevant. But there wasn’t any inquiry into that.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s legal defense team mounted an aggressive offense on Saturday as it opened its side in the Senate impeachment trial by attacking his Democratic accusers as partisan witch-hunters trying to remove him from office because they could not beat him at the ballot box.
After three days of arguments by the House managers prosecuting Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, the president’s lawyers presented the senators a radically different view of the facts and the Constitution, seeking to turn the Democrats’ charges back on them while denouncing the whole process as illegitimate.
“They’re asking you to tear up all of the ballots all across the country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people,” Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, said of the House managers. “They’re here,” he added moments later, “to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history, and we can’t allow that to happen.”
The president’s team spent only two of the 24 hours allotted to them so that senators could leave town for the weekend before the defense presentation resumes on Monday, but it was the first time his lawyers have formally made a case for him since the House opened its inquiry in September. The goal was to poke holes in the House managers’ arguments in order to provide enough fodder to Senate Republicans already inclined to acquit him.
While less combative than their famously combustible client, the lawyers relentlessly assailed the prosecution’s interpretation of events, accusing House Democrats of cherry-picking the facts and leaving out contrary information to construct a skewed narrative. They maintained that none of what the Democrats presented the Senate justified the first eviction of a president from the White House in American history.
“They have the burden of proof,” Mr. Cipollone said, “and they have not come close to meeting it.”
After the session, Democrats contended that the White House arguments actually bolstered their demand to call witnesses like John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, and Mick Mulvaney, his acting White House chief of staff, as well as require documents be turned over, all of which the Republican majority so far has rejected.
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