Trump team begins argument president broke no laws at impeachment trial

Donald Trump’s legal team on Saturday argued that Donald Trump broke no laws and Democrats’ move to impeach him was simply an attempt to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

 “They’re asking you not only to overturn the results of the last election, but as I said they’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot in an election that’s occurring in approximately nine months,” said Pat Cipollone, White House counsel, as he began a full-throated defense of the embattled president.

Cipollone was referring to congressional Democrats who a day before laid out their rationale and evidence for how Trump obstructed Congress from investigating the Trump administration withholding aide to Ukraine.

They’re asking you to tear up all of the ballots across this country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people and I don’t think they spent one minute of their 24 hours talking to you about the consequences of that for our country. Not one minute. ”

Cipollone rounded out his opening remarks with the core of the defense team’s argument: that Trump did not break any laws in an attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden and that House Democrats have omitted key details to make their case.

“You will find that the president did nothing wrong,” Cipollone said. “But what we intend to do today is go through their record that they established in the House. We intend to show you some of the evidence that they introduced in the House that they decided over their three days and 24 hours that they didn’t have enough time or made a decision not to show you.”

The defense team’s arguments were both wide ranging and technical. Patrick Philbin, deputy counsel to the president, said the House did not follow procedures when it issued subpoenas to White House officials. Cipollone and his deputies spent large portions of their time on Saturday arguing that the Democratic impeachment managers – the Democrats leading the impeachment and acting as prosecutors – withheld key evidence that hurt their case.

“We intend to show over the next several days that the evidence is really overwhelming that the president did nothing wrong,” said Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer. “Let me be clear, the House managers over a 23-hour period kept pushing this false dichotomy that it was either Russia or Ukraine but not both.”

The arguments underscore the approach Republicans are taking to the impeachment efforts. Trump’s allies and congressional Republicans have sought a scorched earth approach combining moves to critique technical aspects of the impeachment while establishing that Trump did nothing wrong.

Sekulow added: “This case is really not about presidential wrongdoing. This entire impeachment process is really about the House managers.”

But the overall theme was to establish that Democrats had carried out relentless efforts to impeach the president on something or try any other method to get him out of office. At one point during the proceedings, the defense veered into former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sekulow held up a copy of the report while saying “this investigation did not establish that the campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government.”

Reacting to the Saturday session, Trump over Twitter once again stressed that he did nothing wrong.

Over the past week, Democrats have taken three days to present the case against Trump in the Senate trial. Voluminous evidence gathered by the impeachment inquiry has attempted to show Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others were part of an effort to press the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter, on baseless corruption charges as well as a discredited theory that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

Nearly $400m in US military aid to Ukraine was temporarily frozen during the same period and the US ambassador to Ukraine – Marie Yovanovitch – was eventually fired, apparently after not being supportive enough of the president’s wishes.

In response to the proceedings top Democratic lawmakers said the defense team made an insufficient case.

“They didn’t contest any of the facts. Again, it was diversion,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said at a press conference. “We have to go forward and look at the truth and not be diverted by these kind of ad hominem attacks.”

House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff – who has emerged as the most prominent face of the impeachment effort – focused on the pressure on Ukraine and the aid freeze.

“If this was so above board, if this was really about Donald Trump fighting corruption, why did they hide it from Congress?” Schiff said at the press conference. “Why didn’t they tell Congress and the American people what they were doing? The reason they didn’t tell the American people what they were doing is because it was a corrupt shakedown to get Ukraine to help them cheat in the election.”

Ahead of the beginning of the session Trump sent out a handful of tweets quoting Fox television host Lou Dobbs and also urging Americans to watch the proceedings – a sign that Trump still obsesses over TV ratings.

The launch of Trump’s defense followed an eventful day in the Trump impeachment trial. A new recording emerged on Friday seemingly of Trump calling for Yovanovitch to be removed as ambassador of Ukraine. The recording of Trump making those remarks over dinner to associates was first reported by ABC.

The ongoing impeachment proceedings do not seem to have dramatically moved voters, although the president remains underwater. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 44% of voters approve of the president’s job performance while 51% disapprove.

Trump’s job approval number is up slightly from 38% in October. That seems largely due to the strong American economy. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said they approved of the president’s stewardship of the economy. But on impeachment, 39% approved of how the president has navigated the impeachment trial while 50% disapproved.