President Donald Trump launched his first formal attack on the House’s effort to remove him from office on Saturday, calling the Democrats’ impeachment case against him fatally flawed and “constitutionally invalid” while blasting the effort as a political hit job by his adversaries.
“This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election,” Trump’s lawyers argued in a six-page response filed with the Senate just days before the president’s trial begins in earnest, according to sources close to Trump’s legal team.
The allegations raised by Trump’s attorneys — going after both the substance of the impeachment articles and the process Democrats used to get there — mirror the House’s charges against him. Democrats allege the president pressured Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election on his behalf by launching investigations into his political opponents.
Saturday’s initial reply will be followed by a more exhaustive trial brief that’s due on Monday.
In its first filing, the Trump legal team hammered what it calls “procedural irregularities” in the House’s impeachment process and the decision by Democrats not to accuse the president of committing a statutory crime.
“The bottom line is, in the end, this entire process is nothing more than a dangerous attack on the American people themselves and their fundamental right to vote,” said one of the sources close to the Trump lawyers.
The president’s lawyers won’t be first to make arguments in the Senate trial. Seven House Democratic impeachment managers are expected to begin making their presentation at the start of the week.
When it’s their turn, White House counsel Pat Cipollone plans to open by taking on some of the core constitutional issues behind the impeachment effort. He’ll give way to Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow for an overview of the entire process. New high-profile additions including former special prosecutors Kenneth Starr and Robert Ray and retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz will also be called on to tackle “discrete functions” during the trial, according to the sources close to the legal team.
The Trump plan, however, is also far from final. “We may break it up,” said one of the people close to the legal team. “We don’t know yet.”
The House is due to issue its first formal trial brief later on Saturday, an exhaustive accounting of the evidence against Trump. It will be presented next week by seven Democratic lawmakers appointed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be impeachment “managers.” They include House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Hakeem Jeffries, Val Demings, Sylvia Garcia and Jason Crow.
The House impeached Trump last month, charging him with abusing his power by pressuring the Ukrainian government to launch investigations into his political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden. A second charge alleged that Trump obstructed congressional investigations by ordering a blanket stonewall of the House’s Ukraine probes.
Democrats contend the case against Trump is overwhelming, buttressed by the transcript of a July 25 call between the Trump and Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as a slew of witnesses who testified in the House’s impeachment inquiry throughout the fall.
But they’re demanding that Senate Republicans force the Trump administration to turn over reams of documents and make senior officials available for testimony that Trump had blocked during the House inquiry. Those witnesses, they say, can help prove another central allegation by the House: That Trump leveraged $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, as well as the promise of a White House visit coveted by Zelensky, to pressure him to launch Trump’s favored investigations.
Democrats contend that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine, depended on U.S. support amid an ongoing war against Russian invaders, threatened national security for Trump’s personal benefit.
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January 19, 2020 at 05:11AM
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'Brazen and unlawful': Trump team attacks House impeachment effort in first formal response - POLITICO
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