Trump legal team strikes back against impeachment charges

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s top lawyers argued that Trump “should be immediately acquitted” because the vote to impeach Trump was a “brazenly political act” that did not identify an impeachable offense.

“All that House Democrats have succeeded in proving is that the president did absolutely nothing wrong,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone and private counsel Jay Sekulow claimed in a 110-page summary submitted to the Senate Monday.

The brief responded to the two articles of impeachment, one that charged Trump with abuse of power for suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s role working for a Ukrainian energy company. The other article concerns obstruction of Congress.

The Trump legal team assailed the House articles for not including criminal charges, focusing on motives instead of actions, equating legal defense moves as obstruction, relying on hearsay and generally pushing to remove Trump by impeachment because Democrats lost to Trump at the ballot box in 2016 and fear losing again in November.

House impeachment managers denied every charge that came from the White House.

Referring to a loose transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy – which Trump said proves the exchange was a “perfect” call – head impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff and the six Democrats on his team proclaimed, “we have read the transcript and it confirms his guilt.”

In that statement, the House managers accused Trump of trying to “cheat” in the 2020 elections with the help of Ukraine.

The House managers also asserted that Trump’s “self-serving false statements are contradicted by all of the other evidence. They show a cover-up and consciousness of guilt, not a credible defense for the president.”

The dueling legal documents were released a day ahead of the start of the Senate trial Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 10 a.m. in Las Vegas.

According to Politico, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to fast-track the process by giving the White House and House impeachment legal teams 24 hours each over two days to make opening arguments.

After 16 hours of questions and answers and four hours of debate, the Senate then would vote over whether to allow witness testimony or new information.

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton has said that, if subpoenaed, he is willing to testify before the Senate.

Lev Parnas, an associate of private Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was indicted on campaign finance and perjury charges in October, has expressed interest in testifying as well.

Trump has made it clear that if the Senate votes to include witnesses, he believes Republicans should push for that roster to include Hunter Biden, who earned some $50,000 per month from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma as his father was urging Kyiv to purge corruption.

Biden’s presidential campaign sent out a memo Monday that warned the news media against repeating “the debunked conspiracy theory, that Vice President Biden engaged in wrongdoing when he exercised official United States policy to remove a corrupt (Ukraine) prosecutor from office.”

The memo added, “But to fail to make clear that the conspiracy theory and false accusations about Joe Biden have been comprehensively disproven, to artificially prop-up these egregious lies based on the ‘principle’ that if partisans make accusations, they have to be treated as legitimate regardless of the facts, is to make you an enabler of misinformation.”

It was only Friday that press secretary Stephanie Grisham announced the makeup of the Trump legal team, which would be led by Cipollone and Sekulow. New additions to the team include former Clinton independent counsel Ken Starr and former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

University of California Berkeley Law School professor John Yoo quipped that Trump’s legal dream team auditioned on Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Show as Trump was looking for telegenic defenders, although they may not owe the fealty to Trump to which he has become accustomed.

Over the weekend, Dershowitz, who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, told the BBC that he would not vote for Trump in November.

Dershowitz also told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that his role would not be to defend Trump on the facts, but to argue that the House case simply does not meet the founders’ criteria for “treason, bribery other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

During a phone briefing Monday, a source close to the Trump legal team argued that at least one criminal charge was part of the package when the House impeached President Bill Clinton and President Andrew Johnson, and when Richard Nixon resigned after the House Judiciary Committee approved an article of impeachment. Without a criminal charge, the first article of impeachment fails.

While the General Accounting Office announced last week that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget broke the law by withholding military aid to Ukraine, a White House source close to the Trump legal team argued that the GAO charge is not in the two House impeachment articles.

Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.