Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, saw it coming. As he closed out opening arguments Friday night, he warned senators that they would soon hear from President Trump’s defense team about how unfair his impeachment inquiry was — and not by accident.
“When you hear those attacks, you should ask yourself, away from what do they want to distract my attention?” Mr. Schiff said.
It is a classic trial strategy by a seasoned former prosecutor: Try to prepare the jury so it is not swayed by the defense.
Sure enough, Mr. Trump’s defense team wasted little time on Saturday coming straight after the House managers on the process, playing a clip at the outset of Mr. Schiff at a hearing last year in which he embellished on Mr. Trump’s July 25 conversation with Ukraine’s leader for dramatic effect.
“That’s fake,” Michael M. Purpura, a White House lawyer, said after the recording ended. “That’s not the real call. That’s not the evidence here.”
Mr. Schiff had his own assessment Friday night, reminding senators that he had made clear at the time he was exaggerating Mr. Trump’s words.
“I discovered something very significant by mocking the president,” Mr. Schiff explained. “And that is, for a man who loves to mock others, he does not like to be mocked.”
Another of President Trump’s lawyers, Michael Purpura, the deputy White House counsel, repeatedly pointed to aspects of the testimony during the House inquiry that he said undermined the argument that Mr. Trump was engaging in a quid pro quo.
“We know there was no quid pro quo on the call, we know that from the transcript,” Mr. Purpura said. “There couldn’t possibly have been a quid pro quo because the Ukrainians didn’t know the security assistance was on hold” until a Politico article reported that, he said.
“There can’t be a threat without the person knowing he’s being threatened,” Mr. Purpura said. He played testimony from the House hearings where administration officials testified they did not learn of the freeze until the article published.
But others have said the Ukrainians did become aware of it before the Politico article.
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Senate allies of President Trump, hoping to keep Republicans from breaking ranks and joining Democrats in voting to subpoena witnesses and documents, have argued that the president would invoke executive privilege — raising the question of how such a clash would be resolved.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who is leading the House impeachment managers, has proposed that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. could rule on the validity of any executive privilege claim, saying the trial has “a perfectly good judge sitting behind me.”
But Chief Justice Roberts is functioning as the presiding officer of the Senate trial; he does not embody the Supreme Court. Several legal specialists said that even if he were to rule against any invocation of the privilege, a recipient of a subpoena could choose not to acquiesce and continue to defer to the president’s contrary view. The Senate would still then have to go through the normal court process to seek a judicial order — starting with the Federal District Court, and going through any appeals.
However, everything changes if the person being subpoenaed is willing to testify. A president’s invocation of the privilege, by itself, is not a sword that can stop witnesses from showing up and talking if they want to do so. John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, has already said he is willing to testif if the Senate subpoenas him, notwithstanding Mr. Trump’s instructions to the contrary.
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, led off for President Trump’s team by saying they would focus on aspects of the Ukraine controversy that he accused Democrats of trying to hide.
He read from portions of the reconstructed transcript of Mr. Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine on July 25, and pointed out that Mr. Trump mentioned burden-sharing with European countries.
That has been part of the argument that Mr. Trump’s defenders have offered for why he held up congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine.
Mr. Cipollone closed by referring to the election campaign that is underway, after saying it is Democrats’ true goal.
The Democrats, he said, “are engaged in the most massive interference in an election in American history.” He added, “They’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot.”
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Their argument finished, the House managers made one last stab on Saturday morning to underscore the power of their impeachment case against President Trump by marching from the House to the Senate with boxes filled with 28,578 pages of transcripts and other evidence collected during their inquiry.
Shortly after 9:45, the impeachment managers, led by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, emerged from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and walked to the Senate as their aides wheeled four carts of white bankers boxes stuffed with binders of documents behind them.
But the show of documentary force may have had an unintended effect as well, visually undercutting the Democratic argument that the Senate desperately needs to seek additional documents and witnesses for the trial to be fair.
On the first full day of the trial, Republicans repeatedly rejected Democratic attempts to subpoena more documents and call new witnesses. That question will come up again after arguments from both sides and questions from senators.
President Trump was up early Saturday, lashing out at “lyin’ cheatin’ liddle’ Adam ‘Shifty Schiff” and other Democrats, starting what could be his Twitter play-by-play of his lawyers finally mounting a defense in his impeachment trial.
The tweet underscores what his lawyers already know: that as they begin defending him, Mr. Trump will be watching. That, more than anything else, could shape what is expected to be a fierce attack on the House and its impeachment case.
In keeping with their combative client’s own style, President Trump’s lawyers plan not only to insist he did nothing wrong, but also to go after his accusers in unrelenting terms, painting them as partisans not prosecutors. The lawyers hope to turn the tables on the Democrats by hurling back at them some of the same allegations they have made against their client. By their account, the Democrats are the ones who are corrupt liars who sought foreign help and are now abusing their power to steal an election.
“They don’t trust the American people to make a decision,” one of the president’s lead lawyers, Jay Sekulow, told reporters in the halls of the Capitol on Friday as he previewed the White House argument.
The White House seems likely to go after Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat leading the House managers, who angered some Republican senators with his closing speech on Friday night by citing an anonymously sourced CBS News report that they had been warned their heads would be “on a pike” if they broke from Mr. Trump.
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President Trump faces two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, stemming from his effort to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into his Democratic rivals while withholding nearly $400 million in congressionally approved security aid in what a government agency called a violation of law.
His lawyers maintain that he had every right to set foreign policy as he saw fit and that he had valid concerns about corruption in Ukraine that prompted him to suspend the aid temporarily. They also argue that he was protecting presidential prerogatives by when he refused to allow aides to testify or provide documents in the House proceedings.
Much of their case, however, may focus on the actions of the other side. They plan to discuss in detail former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden. The younger Mr. Biden earned large paychecks sitting on the board of a Ukrainian energy company at the same time his father managed Ukraine policy for the Obama administration. They plan to assail the F.B.I. for its surveillance of a onetime Trump campaign aide, which has been criticized by an inspector general report.
Mr. Trump’s team also plans to highlight what they call a “rigged process” that the House Democrats undertook to orchestrate his impeachment along party lines and argue that they are trying to remove him from office before the November election because they fear he will win a second term. And they will almost surely quote the Democrats themselves who in the past spoke against party-line impeachments.
With the odds stacked against him in the Democratic-run House, President Trump refused to send lawyers to participate in Judiciary Committee hearings last month, complaining that he was not given sufficient due process. But he faces a more receptive audience in the Republican-controlled Senate, where the White House has been working in tandem with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader.
While the House managers presented a damning case against the president over three days of arguments that wrapped up Friday night, Mr. Trump still appears certain to win acquittal in a trial that requires a two-thirds vote to convict and remove him from office. So the main priority for the president’s legal team as it opens its arguments is not to undermine their own advantage or give wavering moderate Republican senators reasons to support Democratic requests for witnesses and documentary evidence.
A vote on that question will not come until next week, and it remains the central question of the impeachment trial, with the potential to either prolong the process and yield new revelations that could further damage Mr. Trump, or to bring the proceeding to a swift conclusion. But after three days of exhaustive arguments by the House managers, there was little indication that there would be enough Republican support to extend the trial by considering new evidence.
President Trump’s legal team plans to mount an aggressive defense that looks more like offense on Saturday as it opens its side in the Senate impeachment trial by attacking his accusers as partisan witch-hunters trying to remove him because they cannot beat him at the ballot box.
As the trial moves into a new phase after three days of arguments by the House managers prosecuting Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, the president’s lawyers will present the senators a radically different view of the facts and the Constitution, while seeking to undercut the whole process by painting it as illegitimate and unfounded.
“We have two goals,” Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lead lawyers, told reporters in advance of the session. “We’re going to refute the allegations they’ve made, and we’re going to put on an affirmative case as well.”
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The video cameras in the Senate are controlled by government employees, trained mostly on one area during the impeachment trial — the front of the room where the chief justice and those speaking at the lectern appear.
Those feeds are the only view of the chamber available to the public since taking photos and other footage of the space is not permitted. To offer a more comprehensive look at how the chamber has been transformed into a courtroom, The New York Times sent a graphics editor to draw it.
See the 3D rendering here, and look for details like the busts along the gallery walls of 20 vice presidents, whose constitutional duties include serving as presidents of the Senate.
When President Trump’s defense lawyers begin to outline their case on Saturday, they will consider everything that Democrats have raised in their own presentation to have opened the door for discussion.
That includes Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose work with a Ukrainian company while his father was in office prompted Mr. Trump to press Ukraine for investigations.
Democrats have rejected any “swap” by which a witness the Democrats want, like John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, would be called in exchange for the younger Mr. Biden. But Mr. Trump’s lawyers still plan to mention Hunter Biden repeatedly, saying that Democratic impeachment managers introduced that window in referring to him during their opening statements.
The Trump team, for its part, appears to feel fairly confident that the Democrats will not have enough votes to call witnesses at the trial.
Among those lawmakers the lawyers have been watching closely is Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, one of four Republicans who have signaled a willingness to call new witnesses. But the lawyers say they have had no indication so far from his public statements that he will deviate from the party line.
As Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House impeachment manager, wrapped up the Democrats’ 24-hour presentation of the case for removing President Trump, he took a few moments on Friday night to forecast the defense team’s counterarguments — and sought to shoot them down.
Mr. Schiff predicted that the president’s team would attack the impeachment process as unfair, charging that Mr. Trump was not given due process, the inquiry was unauthorized and the investigation was conducted in secrecy without a fair opportunity for Republicans to participate.
But Mr. Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee that steered the inquiry, noted that the House voted on ground rules for the investigation. Republicans had been afforded the same opportunity to attend the proceedings and question witnesses as Democrats had, he added, and Mr. Trump was given a chance to participate as well — just as Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard M. Nixon had been before him — although he declined.
“When they say the process was unfair, what they really mean is don’t look at what the president did,” Mr. Schiff said.
He also sought to dismantle the theory Mr. Trump’s lawyers have signaled they will invoke — one rejected by most constitutional scholars — that the president cannot be impeached if he is not charged with a specific crime.
That argument, Mr. Schiff said, was tantamount to a declaration by the president’s legal team that, “We can’t defend the indefensible, so we have to fall back on ‘Even if he abused his office, even if he did all the things he’s accused of, that’s perfectly fine. There’s nothing that can be done about it.’ ”
Mr. Schiff also suggested Mr. Trump’s team would accuse Democrats of impeaching him because “they hate the president.”
“Whether you like the president or you dislike the president is immaterial,” he countered. “If it meets the threshold of impeachable conduct, as we have proved, it doesn’t matter whether you like him. It doesn’t matter whether you dislike him. What matters is whether he is a danger to the country.”
2020-01-25 15:59:00Z
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