Lawyers for U.S. President Donald Trump wrap up their presentation in his Senate impeachment trial Tuesday while the question of whether witnesses will be allowed during the proceedings looms.
The president’s defense team spent Monday accusing Democrats of improperly using impeachment as a weapon to get rid of a president they simply don’t like.
Kenneth Starr, a member of the president’s legal team, called impeachment a political weapon that parties use against one another and said House Democrats impeached Trump without any bipartisan support. Starr described impeachment as “hell.”
Starr was the independent counsel whose investigation led to President Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment for lying to a grand jury about a sex scandal.
“Those of who lived through the Clinton impeachment…full well understand that a presidential impeachment is tantamount to domestic war. It is filled with acrimony and divides the country like nothing else,” he said.
Lawyer Patrick Philbin said the House impeachment inquiry was never about taking the time to find out the truth by issuing subpoenas through the courts. With the 2020 election approaching, he accused House Democrats of rushing to a predetermined outcome to meet a timetable.
Another White House attorney, Jane Raskin, attacked the Democrats for focusing on Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who they say was at the center of the president’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden.
Raskin said Giuliani is a “colorful distraction” from what she says is the lack of evidence that Trump committed a crime. She said if Giuliani is such a central figure, why didn’t the Democrats subpoena him to testify? House committees subpoenaed documents related to Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, but he refused to comply.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, one of the lawmakers serving as prosecutors in the case, said it was “amusing” for the Trump lawyers to label Giuliani a minor figure, and cited the July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“It wasn’t the House that was on the phone with Zelenskiy as the president was, saying repeatedly that he wanted Zelenskiy to talk to Rudy,” Schiff said. “Giuliani’s name, I think, came up more than any other person’s name in that call between the two heads of state. You’ve got to ask, why was that if he was such a bit player as the President’s team now would have you believe?”
Defense attorney Pam Bondi spent her time attacking Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s lucrative job with a Ukrainian gas company. She said questions about a conflict of interest go back as far as 2014, saying Hunter Biden was paid millions of dollars to sit on the board of Burisma while his father was U.S. vice president.
Bondi said Trump had the right to ask Ukraine to investigate the pair even though no evidence of corruption by the Bidens has ever surfaced.
Democrats impeached Trump on two articles — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
He is accused of withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine and putting off a White House meeting unless Zelenskiy was publicly committed to investigating the Bidens and a debunked allegation that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the 2016 U.S. election.
The 100 U.S. senators must decide his guilt or innocence.
But a major line of Trump’s defense could fall apart. Former national security adviser John Bolton has reportedly written in a yet-to-be-published book that Trump personally told him he wanted to withhold the aid to Ukraine until Ukraine committed to the investigations.
Trump denies there was any quid pro quo with Ukraine, and Monday called Bolton’s assertion “totally false.”
Bolton has said he is willing to appear as a witness if he is subpoenaed and the Democrats say they would like to hear from him. A few Republicans are also expressing that desire.
So far, minority Democrats in the Senate have been waging a futile battle to get at least four Republican senators to join them in a simple majority to subpoena Bolton and other Trump officials to testify about their recollections of behind-the-scenes meetings with Trump about Ukraine last year.
Trump’s lawyers contend there have been no firsthand accounts of officials who spoke with the president directly about his Ukraine actions. But Bolton often met with Trump until the U.S. leader ousted him last September from his national security post.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a Republican who supports calling White House witnesses whom Trump has blocked from testifying, said the Bolton book revelation makes it “increasingly likely” that more Republican senators will agree to hear testimony from Bolton and others.
Maine Senator Susan Collins, another Republican who has signaled she is open to witnesses, said news reports about the Bolton book “strengthen the case for witnesses.”
But it was uncertain whether Senate Republicans supporting Trump, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have changed their minds. Calling witnesses could significantly extend the length of the trial.
