POLITICO
IMPEACHMENT
Battle over impeachment witnesses escalates
Key players in President Donald Trump’s impending trial amplified their arguments on the Sunday news shows.
By JOHN BRESNAHAN
01/19/2020 01:19 PM EST
With President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial just two days away, the battle over whether to call witnesses during the proceedings, including former national security adviser John Bolton, continues to heat up.
Several of the House managers for the impeachment trial, including Reps. Adam Schiff of California, Jerry Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and Jason Crow of Colorado, appeared on Sunday news shows to urge the Senate to allow new witnesses and evidence during the process as they seek to oust Trump from office. These Democrats repeatedly pushed the line that the only way to get a “fair trial” is through additional testimony and documents.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republicans intend to offer an organizing resolution for the trial that postpones the question of calling witnesses until the House has presented its case and the president’s legal team responds. Then, following a period in which senators are allowed to ask questions of both sides, the Senate will hold a vote on whether to call more witnesses. If no witnesses are called, the trial can move to its final stages, possibly by the time Trump gives his State of the Union address on Feb. 4.
“If the Senate decides, if Senator McConnell prevails and there are no witnesses, it will be the first impeachment trial in history that goes to conclusion without witnesses,” Schiff, the lead House manager for the trial, said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The threshold issue here is, will there be a fair trial? Will the senators allow the House to call witnesses to introduce documents? That is the foundational issue on which everything else rests. And one thing that the public is overwhelmingly in support of, and that is a fair trial.”
Jeffries added on “Fox News Sunday”: “The most important thing is that the American people deserve a fair trial. The Constitution deserves a fair trial. Our democracy deserves a fair trial. And we believe that a fair trial involves witnesses. It involves evidence. It involves documents.”
But Senate Republicans, led by Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and David Perdue of Georgia, countered that the House managers should proceed with the evidence they used to impeach Trump in the House.
And Republicans echoed the White House line that the House impeachment hearings violated Trump’s right to due process, despite the fact that the president refused to allow his lawyers to participate in those sessions.
“I find it curious that Chairman Nadler of the Judiciary Committee called this a ‘rock-solid’ case,” Cornyn said on CBS’ “Face The Nation. “But if the House isn’t prepared to go forward with the evidence that they produced in the impeachment inquiry, maybe they ought to withdraw the articles of impeachment and start over again. This isn’t the Senate’s responsibility to make the case.”
“This, to me, seems to undermine or indicate that they’re getting cold feet or have a lack of confidence in what they’ve done so far,” Cornyn added.
Perdue said on NBC’s “Meet The Press”: “Remember, this week is going to be the first time America gets to hear President Trump’s defense. He hasn’t had an opportunity to do that yet. It’s clear the president did not have due process in the House. Now, for the first time, we’ll have due process in the Senate.”
A number of Senate Republicans, including Cornyn, have called for former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to be deposed if Bolton testifies in the case. Trump allies are calling this “witness reciprocity,” and McConnell appears open to their demand, according to GOP aides familiar with these discussions.
Yet Nadler, Schiff and the other House managers maintain that Hunter Biden is not germane to the case, since he cannot speak to the underlying issue of whether Trump improperly withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine contingent on officials there announcing an investigation into the Bidens.
“And this whole controversy about whether there should be witnesses is just really a question of, does the Senate want to have a fair trial … or are they part of the cover-up of the president?” Nadler said on “Face The Nation.“ “Any Republican senator who says there should be no witnesses or even that witnesses should be negotiated is part of the cover-up.”
So far, only three Senate Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — have publicly declared that they’re open to hearing from additional witnesses, including Bolton. But in order for that to occur, at least one more Senate Republican would have to withstand Trump’s pressure and cross the aisle to vote with the 47 Senate Democrats.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been appealing to Republicans for weeks to support Democrats on this issue, pointing to new evidence that has emerged since the House voted on Dec. 18 to impeach Trump. This additional evidence includes Bolton’s public offer to testify before the Senate; the Government Accountability Office analysis that the White House violated federal law by withholding the Ukraine funds after Congress had appropriated the money; and new documents turned over to the House Intelligence Committee by Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, on the role Giuliani played in the Ukraine scandal.
Schumer highlighted Parnas’ newly released documents as well as the GAO report at a news conference Sunday evening.
“Not Chuck Schumer, not a House Democrat but the impartial GAO said the president broke the law,” Schumer said. “That GAO report undid everything the president’s letter said and everything Mitch McConnell has been saying.”
In addition, Schumer lambasted the president’s lawyers for their first formal response to the House’s efforts to remove him from office. In a six-page letter filed Saturday, the president’s read lawyers described the impeachment inquiry as a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election.”
“It read more like a transcript of one of his campaign rallies, or six pages of @realDonaldTrump tweets rather than a legal defense,” Schumer said. “I hope for the president’s sake when their brief is released tomorrow, it’s better than that. It’s not just screaming and jumping up and down and pounding the table but it actually answers some questions.”
The Senate Minority Leader also criticized McConnell for not yet releasing his organizing resolution for the impeachment trial, calling it “unheard of.” Senate Republicans are weighing an aggressive impeachment trial schedule, whereby the House impeachment managers and the president’s defense would be allocated 24 hours each for opening arguments. Each side could have as few as two days to present their case.
“Whether it’s because McConnell knows the trial is a cover up and wants to whip through it as quickly as possible or because he’s afraid even more evidence will come out, he’s trying to rush it through,” Schumer said. “That is wrong. And it is so wrong that no one even knows what his plan is a day and a half before one of the most momentous decisions any senator will ever make.”
How Trump fused his business empire to the presidency
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{And it goes on and on, with the usual vitriolic rhetoric of hate, but it appears we are approaching more elev a red drama, as a requirement to introject the rapidly loosing public support.
There will certainly begin a show of casualties, and it will be a thrill to watch as it is to try to guess. Who needs the apprentice now, that we have the veritable showman?}
IDEAS
Trump’s Impeachment Brief Is a Howl of Rage
The document released by the president’s lawyers reads more like the scream of a wounded animal than a traditional legal filing.
QUINTA JURECICBENJAMIN WITTES11:55 AM ET
KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS
Over the weekend, as the Senate prepared for the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the newly appointed House impeachment managers and the president’s newly appointed legal team both filed their initial legal briefs.
At least, one of them was a legal brief. The other read more like the scream of a wounded animal.
The House managers’ brief is an organized legal document. It starts with the law, the nature and purposes of Congress’s impeachment power, then walks through the evidence regarding the first article of impeachment, which alleges abuse of power, and seeks to show how the evidence establishes the House’s claim that President Trump is guilty of this offense. It then proceeds to argue that the offense requires his removal from office.
The brief then rinses and repeats the exercise with respect to the second article of impeachment, which deals with alleged obstruction of Congress. It concludes: “President Trump has betrayed the American people and the ideals on which the Nation was founded. Unless he is removed from office, he will continue to endanger our national security, jeopardize the integrity of our elections, and undermine our core constitutional principles.”
By contrast, the White House’s “Answer of President Donald J. Trump” to the articles of impeachment, filed by the president’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow and the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, does not read like a traditional legal argument at all. It begins with a series of rhetorical flourishes—all of them, to one degree or another, false. The articles of impeachment are “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their President,” the president’s lawyers write—as though the impeachment power were not a constitutional reality every bit as enshrined in the founding document as the quadrennial election of the president. The articles are “a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election,” and are “constitutionally invalid on their face,” they write, as though the president’s right to extort foreign leaders for political services were so beyond reasonable question, it is outrageous that anyone might object to it.
This document reads like one of the president’s speeches at his campaign rallies. The language is a little more lawyerly, if only a little. In Sekulow and Cipollone’s hands, Trump’s cries of “Witch hunt!” have turned into “lawless process that violated basic due process and fundamental fairness.” His allegations that Democrats are a “disgrace” have turned into “an affront to the Constitution.” And Trump’s insistence that there’s a plot to destroy his presidency has become a “highly partisan and reckless obsession with impeaching the president [that] began the day he was inaugurated and continues to this day.”
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But the message is unchanged. It’s not a legal argument. It’s a howl of rage.
There is, to be sure, a lack of parallelism between the purposes of the two documents. The House managers’ document is an opening brief that lays out the prosecutors’ case at some length, while the president’s response is an initial six-page reply to the articles. The White House’s first full brief is due this afternoon, so it’s possible that the lawyers will sound, well, a little more like lawyers in that document. But don’t hold your breath.
In fact, this is not the first time Cipollone has signed his name to a screed along these lines. In October, shortly after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry, Cipollone sent the House a rambling eight-page letter that read almost as if it had been dictated by the president—down to the obsessive focus on the moral failings of the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam Schiff, which would be familiar to anyone reading the president’s Twitter feed. The former White House counsel Bob Bauer decried it as offering “arguments hopelessly weak in substance, political in both content and tone, and harmful to the credibility of [Cipollone’s] office.”
The document produced by the White House this weekend is a little more organized, but the arguments and the angry tone are the same. Read together, Cipollone’s October letter and this new document written with Sekulow set expectations for the president’s defense: barely contained, and barely coherent, rage—a middle finger stuck at the impeachment process, rather than any kind of organized effort to convince senators or the public that the president’s conviction would be unmerited, imprudent, or unjust.
Consciously or not, Trump’s pick of defense counsel for the Senate trial sends the same message. Along with Sekulow and Cipollone, the president will be represented by the former independent counsels Ken Starr and Robert Ray—Starr’s successor in the investigations against Bill Clinton—and the Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, among others. This is not the legal team one might expect a president facing the fight of his political life to select. Starr, after all, made robust arguments during the Clinton impeachment against the assertion of executive privilege and made others for the impeachability of a president for obstructing an investigation into his conduct using privilege claims. Dershowitz has made plenty of arguments against impeaching and convicting Trump in recent years, but he has a habit of staking out positions that are not merely iconoclastic—like that the president may be impeached only for violating the criminal code, or that the Supreme Court could overturn an unjust conviction in an impeachment trial—but intellectually sloppy, too.
Were Trump trying to make a traditional legal argument, he’d have picked the wrong legal counsel. But that’s not what the president is trying to do. CNN describes the president’s merry band as a “Fox News defense team,” noting that the main through line among the lawyers representing Trump is that they have all regularly appeared on the president’s favorite network. It’s not that the president’s legal team lacks talent. Starr was, after all, an esteemed appellate lawyer, a judge on the D.C. circuit, and the solicitor general of the United States. And Dershowitz was a Harvard law professor. But the president isn’t fundamentally making a legal case here. His arguments are that his phone call was “perfect,” that there’s a “deep state” conspiracy against him, and that impeachment is an effort to overturn an election. You don’t need good lawyers to make such silly arguments. You need lawyers who will yell untruths loudly, lawyers whose very presence will argue the us-against-them nature of the president’s defense.
And this is a group of people who do just that. Just by being there, they will make the president feel good, feel validated. Their presence will give expression to his anger, in the same way that Brett Kavanaugh’s tirade against the Senate Judiciary Committee reportedly delighted Trump.
For this reason, the contradiction of choosing Starr to argue in favor of a hyperaggressive vision of executive privilege and against conviction on the basis of obstruction of justice isn’t a problem, just as Dershowitz’s lazy argumentation and Cipollone’s hyperventilating outrage aren’t problems either. They’re the whole point. Flaunting the dissonance of having Starr defending a president in an impeachment trial is itself an expression of rage and defiance against the president’s critics—including, one must imagine, Hillary Clinton, whom both Starr and Ray investigated. It’s a legal team designed to own the libs, and the fact that Dershowitz has been accused of perpetrating misconduct against women (allegations he denies), and Starr of mishandling an investigation into such allegations, is perhaps no coincidence.
To the extent that there is an argument in the president’s defense, it’s that the president’s rage is more important than building a systematic legal case. Putting together a legal brief, after all, depends on a system of mutual understanding between the writer and the audience. The goal is to convince a neutral arbiter of the correctness of one’s point, within a structure of traditions and constraints. Trump’s howl of anger is a declaration that he doesn’t need to convince any arbiter, abide by any constraints, or reach any understanding, because his own emotions are the most important thing.
But the flip side of Trump’s insistence on his own preeminence is his grasping need for other people to reaffirm him. And so the president’s defense, the argument and the team alike, has another purpose: It’s a message to Republican senators. It says to each of them that no, the White House will not make a factual argument on the merits of the case—not a real one, anyway. And no, it will not make a real legal argument either. It, rather, will announce that, per George Orwell, two plus two equals five. And it will demand of the senators that they get in line to endorse that proposition, preferably on television, where the president can see. It will be a failure of loyalty if they are not willing to do this. And they will be subject to retaliation.
It’s not a strategy that would work in court. But the Senate is not, at the end of the day, a court—even when it’s sitting as the trial court of an impeachment. The Senate is a body composed of people who, as the past few years of Republicans’ willing subjection to Trump have shown, are exquisitely sensitive to this sort of pressure.
And the more absurdly bombastic the defense gets, the stronger this message becomes.
BENJAMIN WITTES is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings institution
Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.
BBC News
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Trump impeachment: President’s lawyers demand immediate acquittal
20 January 2020
Image captionPresident Trump is facing two counts of impeachment
President Donald Trump’s legal team, representing him at his impeachment trial, has demanded that he is immediately acquitted by the Senate.
In a brief submitted on Monday, they called the impeachment “a dangerous perversion” of the constitution.
Meanwhile House impeachment managers submitted their own brief, saying Mr Trump engaged in “corrupt conduct… to cheat in the next election”.
Impeachment hearings will begin on Tuesday at 13:00 (18:00 GMT).
Mr Trump is charged with abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden - and of obstructing Congress as it looked into his conduct.
During the course of the trial, Senators will hear arguments for six hours a day, six days a week. It will be presided over by the US chief justice, John Roberts.
It is only the third time in US history that a president is facing an impeachment trial.
The trial could, in theory, lead to Mr Trump being removed from office. But as a two-thirds majority of 67 votes in the 100-seat Senate is required to convict and oust Mr Trump, and there are only 47 Democrats in the Senate, the president is widely expected to be cleared.
Mr Trump will be at the economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, when his trial opens.
What did the briefs say?
The 171-page brief submitted by Mr Trump’s legal team is the first comprehensive defence of the president, ahead of the trial beginning in earnest.
It sets out to undercut the charges against Mr Trump, branding them “frivolous and dangerous” and arguing that they don’t constitute either a crime or an impeachable offence.
“House Democrats settled on two flimsy Articles of Impeachment that allege no crime or violation of law whatsoever - much less ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ as required by the Constitution,” it said.
“They do not remotely approach the constitutional threshold for removing a President from office.”
At the same time, an opposing brief from House managers - all Democrats - accused Mr Trump of using his “presidential powers to pressure a vulnerable foreign partner to interfere in our elections for his own benefit”.
“In doing so, he jeopardised our national security and our democratic self-governance,” it added. “He then used his presidential powers to orchestrate a cover-up unprecedented in the history of our republic.”
What are the charges?
First, he’s accused of seeking help from Ukraine’s government to help himself get re-elected in November.
It is claimed that, during a call with Ukrainain President Volodymyr Zelensky, he held back military aid in exchange for an investigation into Hunter Biden - the son of Mr Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and a former member of the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
The second allegation is that, by refusing to allow White House staff to testify at the first impeachment hearings last year, Mr Trump obstructed Congress.
President Trump denies the charges against him.
Copyright © 2020 BBC.
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IMPEACHMENT
Poll: Most Americans want Trump removed from office by Senate
51 percent of respondents support the Senate convicting Trump on articles of impeachment
01/20/2020 05:01 PM EST
A majority of Americans want the Senate to convict and remove President Donald Trump from office, according to a new poll conducted by CNN.
Fifty-one percent of respondents to the poll want the Senate to convict Trump on the impeachment charges brought by the House, which would lead to his immediate expulsion from office. Meanwhile, 45 percent of respondents said they don’t want to see the president removed. The poll was conducted from Jan. 16-19 and released Monday, on the eve of the Senate impeachment trial, which gets underway Tuesday, though senators were sworn in last week.
The numbers are the most favorable for removal since another CNN poll in June 2018. Approval for impeachment and removal has generally hovered between 36 and 47 percent, peaking at 50 percent in polls from October and November 2019, once impeachment proceedings were underway in the House.
The latest poll also suggests Americans are largely invested in the impeachment proceedings, with 74 percent of respondents saying they are either very closely or somewhat closely following the developments.
The majority of respondents to CNN’s survey said they want the Senate to hear from more witnesses, with 69 percent wanting the Senate to hear fresh testimony, and only 29 percent rejecting the idea.
Democrats have lambasted the White House for preventing members of the administration from testifying for House investigators before the articles of impeachment were sent to the Senate. While Democrats in the Senate hoped to remedy the problem by calling on witnesses in their trial, Senate Republicans have largely rejected the idea of hearing from witnesses, saying that was the House’s job.
CNN’s study was conducted by phone among a sample of 1,156 respondents. The margin of error is +/- 3.4 percentage points.
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
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impeachment trial begins
Pres. Trump just snubbed his outspoken personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, keeping him from joining his growing defense team for the impeachment trial. Giuliani has reportedly proven too large a liability, including his links to indicted businessman Lev Parnas, and this report tracks Giuliani’s history of questionable business judgment, including another major figure who was indicted after running the NYPD, a business alliance Giuliani later admitted was a “mistake.”
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