President Trump’s defense team is poised to present its third and final day of opening arguments in his historic impeachment trial in the Senate, as a debate rages outside the chamber over whether to call witnesses before its conclusion.
Pressure has ramped up to include witnesses following reports that former national security adviser John Bolton says in a book manuscript that Trump directly tied the holdup of nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine to investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
The crux of the case for Trump’s impeachment is the allegation that he withheld military aid and a White House meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, while his father was vice president. Trump’s attorneys have argued that he was justified in seeking investigations because of a history of corruption involving the company.
●Leaked Bolton book threatens to upend Senate impeachment trial.
●White House works to contain damage from allegations in forthcoming Bolton book.
●Bolton book roils Washington as onetime allies turn on Trump’s former national security adviser.
The Senate impeachment trial process | The impeachment managers |Which senators support removing Trump | Trump’s legal team brief | House Democrats’ response
9:45 AM: Rep. Biggs says Bolton testimony would be largely irrelevant
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a staunch ally of Trump, argued Tuesday that testimony from Bolton would be largely irrelevant to a Senate trial.
“I don’t know what he’s going to say, and frankly, in many instances, it’s irrelevant what he’s going to say. The case has been presented,” he said during an interview on Fox News. “This doesn’t change anything.”
Biggs said that if the door is opened to witnesses, Republicans should not only call Hunter Biden but several others, including the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the House impeachment inquiry, and someone familiar with the thinking of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
By: John Wagner
8:55 AM: Schiff questions why GOP lawmakers want to ‘seamlessly tie themselves to this president’
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the lead impeachment manager, accused Republicans of being “fairly shortsighted” in their loyalty to Trump during the impeachment trial.
“It doesn’t require a great prescience to know history is not going to be kind to this president,” Schiff said during an appearance on MSNBC in which he questioned why GOP lawmakers would want to “seamlessly tie themselves to this president.”
Schiff also made a fresh appeal for including witnesses in the trial.
“If the senators don’t call witnesses, this is not a fair trial,” Schiff said. “It’s not a trial at all.”
By: John Wagner
8:25 AM: Pelosi renews call for a ‘fair trial,’ knocks Trump defense team
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) renewed her call for a “fair trial” in a tweet Tuesday in which she also characterized Trump’s lawyers as having argued that he has “a right to abuse his power as much as he wants.”
Her tweet came a day after Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz told the Senate that “purely noncriminal conduct, including ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstruction of justice,’ are outside the range of impeachable offenses.”
“Trump’s lawyers argued he has a right to abuse his power as much as he wants, and Congress can do nothing about it,” Pelosi said in her tweet. “Sounds familiar.”
She then quoted Trump from a speech in July in which he asserted Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”
“Congress can do something: hold a fair trial,” Pelosi added.
By: John Wagner
8:10 AM: Sen. Durbin says he’s not interested in ‘trading baseball cards’
Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday panned a plan by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), an influential conservative, to summon just two witnesses in Trump’s trial, with one called by Republicans and one by Democrats.
Asked on CNN whether he’d consider trading Bolton for Hunter Biden, Durbin strongly pushed back on the notion.
“Listen, we’re not trading baseball cards,” Durbin said. “We’re not kids sitting around here, picking our favorite and putting them in the middle of the circle. … This idea of bargaining — ‘Well, we’ll give you one irrelevant witness for one material witness’ — baloney.”
Durbin said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is presiding over Trump’s trial, should decide which witnesses are relevant.
By: John Wagner
7:45 AM: Rep. Demings says Trump defense has evolved in recent days
Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), one of the House impeachment managers, argued Tuesday that Trump’s defense team’s arguments have evolved in recent days.
During a CNN appearance, Demings was asked about an assertion Monday by Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz that “nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”
“We’ve gone from ‘The president did nothing wrong, the call was perfect’ to ‘There was no quid pro quo’ to ‘Well, if I did do it, so what?’ ” Demings said. “The American people are not going to fall for that.”
The call she referred to took place in July between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has repeatedly described the call, in which he pressed Zelensky for an investigation of the Bidens, as “perfect.”
By: John Wagner
7:30 AM: Trump to unveil Middle East peace plan, hold campaign rally
As the Senate trial unfolds on Capitol Hill, Trump plans Tuesday to announce his long-awaited Middle East peace plan before heading to New Jersey for a “Keep America Great” campaign rally with Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), a former Democrat who switched his affiliation after the House voted last month to impeach Trump.
[Trump’s Middle East peace plan expected to offer Palestinians conditional statehood]
Trump is scheduled to appear alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a White House event at noon at which his aides say he is expected to detail a proposal for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dates from Israel’s founding in 1948.
The president previewed his proposal in private meetings Monday with Netanyahu and the veteran Israeli leader’s challenger in upcoming elections, Benny Gantz.
Tuesday night’s rally is being held in Wildwood, N.J. Trump has often used his campaign rallies to air grievances about his impeachment and the Democrats who pushed it.
By: John Wagner
7:10 AM: Trump campaign compares Bolton manuscript to Kavanaugh allegations
A Trump campaign spokesman on Tuesday compared the emergence of the Bolton manuscript to allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018 was upended by late-hour allegations that he had committed sexual assault while a teenager in the 1980s. He was eventually confirmed after days of dramatic testimony and debate.
“Striking parallels between Bolton leak & what Dems and the media tried to do to Brett Kavanaugh,” tweeted Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for the Trump campaign. “Same playbook: Breathless media reporting ‘bombshells’ to try to alter events. Bolton leak changes no facts, but Trump opponents and the media are obviously working hand in hand.”
By: John Wagner
7:05 AM: Pelosi shares editorial that supports calling witnesses
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday widely shared a New York Times editorial that supports calling Bolton and other witnesses in the Senate trial.
“It’s just possible that common sense and reality have a shot at prying open the doors to the Senate chamber after all,” said the editorial, which Pelosi’s office blasted to reporters over email. “After Republican senators claimed that it was perfectly reasonable to put a United States president on trial without hearing from any witnesses, a few of them are showing signs of recognizing that the truth matters. Or, at least, that the American people believe it does.”
The editorial cited comments from several Republicans in response to reports that Bolton’s book manuscript says Trump directly tied the holdup of nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine to investigations of Biden and his son.
By: John Wagner
7:00 AM: Trump team to present third and final day of opening arguments
AP
In this image from video, White House adviser and former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi speaks during the impeachment trial against President Trump in the Senate on Monday.
Trump’s legal team is set Tuesday to present its third and final day of opening arguments in his impeachment trial in the Senate, as debate continues outside the chamber over whether Bolton and other witnesses will be called.
The trial is scheduled to resume at 1 p.m.
On Monday, Trump’s lawyers pushed forward with their defense of the president, largely ignoring the uproar caused by leaked details from a book by Bolton. As part of their defense, they pivoted into a sharp line of attack on Joe Biden and his son Hunter over their involvement in Ukraine.
Trump’s attorneys also devoted some of their floor time Monday to arguing that Trump acted appropriately in delaying the security aid to Ukraine, and that he did so because of his concerns about corruption in that country and about whether other nations were doing their fair share in providing security support.
Once Trump’s team wraps up, senators will be given up to 16 hours to pose written questions to both the House managers and Trump’s defense team.
Once that takes place, a crucial vote is expected, possibly on Friday, on whether to hear from witnesses before the trial concludes. For Democrats to succeed in calling witnesses, they will need at least four GOP senators to vote with them.
By: John Wagner and Erica Werner
6:15 AM: Hard-charging White House budget lawyer in middle of Ukraine decision has pushed legal limits for Trump
A hard-charging conservative lawyer little known to the public is responsible for executing some of the White House’s most divisive and legally aggressive moves, including the hold on Ukrainian aid now central to Trump’s impeachment trial.
Mark Paoletta, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, signed off on the delay of security assistance to Ukraine, overruling the objections of some career staffers at the OMB and the Pentagon. The Government Accountability Office recently determined that the delay was unlawful.
Paoletta’s below-the-radar role in a decision key to Trump’s impeachment is just one example of how he has enabled the White House to stretch the legal limits of the executive branch — forcefully pushing forward the administration’s agenda but sometimes incurring a severe backlash in the process.
Read more here.
By: Erica Werner, Jeff Stein and Josh Dawsey
6:00 AM: Who is paying the president’s lawyers in the impeachment trial?
As Trump faces mounting legal bills from his impeachment trial, he is drawing on national party coffers flush with donations from energized supporters — unlike the last president to be impeached.
The Republican National Committee is picking up the tab for at least two of Trump’s private attorneys in the ongoing trial, an arrangement that differs from the legal fund President Bill Clinton set up, only to see it fail to raise enough to cover his millions of dollars in bills before he left office.
The law firms of Trump’s lead lawyer, Jay Sekulow and attorney Jane Raskin have received a total of $225,000 from the RNC through November, according to the most recent campaign finance reports. The party will pay the duo for their work this month and likely into February as the trial continues, according to people familiar with the arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal financing.
Read more here.
By: Ann E. Marimow, Beth Reinhard and Josh Dawsey
5:30 AM: Trump offers spate of tweets and retweets on impeachment
Trump returned to Twitter late Monday to share a spate of tweets and retweets, many of them focused on impeachment.
Among them was a tweet by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioning why Bolton had declined to testify during the House impeachment proceedings.
“Why didn’t John Bolton testify to the US House? Apparently his book wasn’t quite finished yet for presales!” Paul tweeted.
By: John Wagner
5:00 AM: Court asked to define what federal employees can say about impeachment
A court has been asked to define the limits of what federal employees may say in the workplace about the impeachment and trial of Trump without running afoul of restrictions against partisan politics by civil servants.
The request, filed last Friday in an ongoing suit, asks the court to immediately block policies that it says are causing federal employees to self-censor out of fear of being charged with violating the Hatch Act.
Those policies were issued in 2018 when impeachment was only a theoretical topic, “but with the impeachment trial dominating national news, the issue has become more urgent as the policy is chilling the free speech rights of federal employees,” said the American Federation of Government Employees, which is sponsoring the suit.
The Hatch Act bars federal employees from using their official authority to support a political party, candidate in a partisan race or partisan political group. Also, while on duty or in a federal workplace, they may not engage in political activity directed at the success or failure of such a party, candidate or group. Penalties for violations can range up to firing and debarment from future federal employment.
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that enforces that law, said in early 2018 that “merely discussing impeachment, without advocating for or against its use against such a candidate, is not political activity.” For example, it said, employees “may discuss whether reported conduct by the president warrants impeachment and express an opinion about whether the president should be impeached” but may not display signs in the office for or against impeachment.
The AFGE motion, though, contends that “the distinction between ‘advocating’ for or against impeachment and ‘expressing an opinion about whether the president should be impeached’ is indecipherable.”
By: Eric Yoder
2020-01-28 15:01:00Z
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