President Donald Trump’s lawyers took the Senate floor Saturday morning to open their defense in his impeachment trial, wrapping up their initial arguments within two hours.
The defense’s opening presentation was unusually brief after House Democrats’ impeachment managers stretched their arguments for about eight hours on each of three days.
Trump’s lawyers have Monday and Tuesday to finish their defense, as each side gets three days and up to 24 hours to make their cases to senators. The House’s seven impeachment managers, urging the Senate to remove Trump from office, used all but about three hours of their allotted time.
Trump weighed in on Twitter well after the Senate adjourned shortly after noon.
In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance.
Any fair minded person watching the Senate trial today would be able to see how unfairly I have been treated and that this is indeed the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax that EVERYBODY, including the Democrats, truly knows it is. This should never be allowed to happen again!
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Here are five highlights from the opening arguments of the president’s lawyers.
1. ‘Massive Interference in an Election’
The Democrat-controlled House voted Dec. 18 to impeach Trump, alleging he abused his power and obstructed Congress in connection with his July 25 phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In the call, the two men briefly discussed Trump’s interest in Zelenskyy’s investigating possible Ukrainian interference in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 as well as Ukrainian-related actions taken by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
House Democrats allege that Trump used the power of his office to solicit Ukraine to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in 2020.
White House counsel Pat Cipollone countered that it is Democrats’ impeachment effort that seeks to “perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history.”
“They’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot,” Cipollone said.
If two-thirds of the Senate, or 67 senators, vote to remove a president from office, they also may disqualify him from holding another federal office.
“They’re asking you to do something that no Senate has ever done, and they’re asking you to do that with no evidence, and that’s wrong,” Cipollone said.
Cipollone said Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California, Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York, and the other five House impeachment managers “hid evidence” from the Senate.
The White House counsel pointed to the official transcript of the Trump-Zelenskyy call, ordered released by the president, which shows that both leaders talked about “burden-sharing” in support of Ukraine by other European countries.
Cipollone said of the House managers:
They come here to the Senate and they ask you [to] remove a president, tear up the ballots in all of your states, and they don’t bother to read the key evidence of the discussion of burden-sharing that’s in the call itself. Now, that’s emblematic of their entire presentation.
They have the burden of proof. And they have not come close to meeting it.
2. Focus on ‘6 Key Facts’
In 2016, Biden, as vice president, threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid from Ukraine unless the Eastern European nation fired Viktor Shokin, the state prosecutor who was investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, held a high-paying job on the board of Burisma at the same time his father was the Obama administration’s point man for Ukraine policy.
In his July 25 phone call with Zelenskyy, Trump said he would appreciate Ukraine’s investigating the matter along with Ukraine’s possible meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
At the time, unknown to Zelenskyy, Trump had put a hold on $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to the former Soviet republic to counter Russian aggression, which he would lift in September.
Deputy White House counsel Mike Purpura said the entire case put forward by House impeachment managers melts under what he said were “six key facts”:
First, the transcript shows that the president did not condition either security assistance or a meeting on anything. Second, President Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials repeatedly have said there was no quid pro quo and no pressure on them to review anything.
Third, President Zelenskyy and high-ranking Ukrainian officials did not even know the security assistance was paused until the end of August, over a month after the July 25 call.
Fourth, not a single witness testified that the president himself [Trump] said that there was any connection between any investigations in security assistance, a presidential meeting or anything else.
Fifth, the security assistance flowed on Sept. 11 and a presidential meeting took place on Sept. 25 [at the United Nations] without the Ukrainian government announcing any investigations.
Finally, the Democrats’ blind drive to impeach the president does not and cannot change the fact, as attested to by the Democrats’ own witnesses, that President Trump has been a better friend and stronger supporter of Ukraine than his predecessor.
On the last point, numerous witnesses who testified at the House impeachment hearings made clear that they supported the Trump administration’s policy of providing lethal weapons to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia.
President Barack Obama’s administration had refused to provide such weaponry.
3. ‘Claiming to Be Mind Readers’
Zelenskyy and his aides in Ukraine have said on several occasions that they did not believe the U.S. was pressuring them to begin investigations of Burisma and possible Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, which the president’s lawyers were eager to note.
“Of course, the best evidence that there was no pressure or quid pro quo is the statements of Ukrainians themselves,” Purpura told senators. “The fact that President Zelenskyy himself felt no pressure on the call and did not perceive there to be any connection between security assistance and...
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