President Donald Trump will return to the campaign trail to repay a political favor and take his case for re-election into deep-blue New Jersey.

       

Donald Trump's legal defense team ended its arguments with more than 13 hours on the clock after closing arguments Tuesday.

       

President Trump's defense team uses its final day of arguments summarizing that the impeachment is not constitutional and based on false premises.

       

President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team knew they were likely to win — and they proceeded accordingly.

With a virtually negligible threat of conviction and removal by a Republican-controlled Senate, Trump’s legal team spent just a sliver of their 11-hour arguments rebutting the House’s charge that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his rivals.

Instead, they tailored a defense that often mirrored the president’s pre-trial demands: to exact pain and revenge against his political nemeses, all on the Senate floor.

What ensued was a Who’s Who of the president’s frequent Twitter targets: Obama, Comey, Mueller, Strzok, Page, Ohr — names that had little to no connection to the impeachment charges, but occupy a lot of space on Trump’s list of political enemies and whom Trump perceives as at least a part of the reason he will bear the stain of impeachment.

“That’s what the president’s been living with. And then we’re here today arguing about what — a phone call to Ukraine or Ukraine aid being held? Or a question about corruption?” Trump’s lead personal attorney Jay Sekulow said during Tuesday’s session. “I mean, is that what this is? Is that where we are?”

Of the 15 presentations made by Trump’s lawyers over three days, just two were entirely focused on House Democrats’ Ukraine allegations — both of which were helmed by White House Deputy Counsel Michael Purpura.

Three presentations by Purpura’s fellow White House lawyer Patrick Phibin asserted that the House’s case was procedurally defective and should be rejected for process-related failures, a response to the House’s second impeachment article charging Trump with obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry. Two were high-level overviews by Trump’s lead lawyer Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. And another two centered on the constitutional cases against removing the president from office, delivered by Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz, two high-profile outside attorneys added for a bit of star power.

W.H. defense team conclude their opening arguments

That left five speeches that seemed entirely intended to scratch Trump’s itch to drag his political rivals into the impeachment arena, something he repeatedly foreshadowed in the weeks leading up to the trial. It was a consistent tactic for Trump, who has maintained for months that his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president — the conversation at the center of Trump’s impeachment, in which he pushed for an investigation into 2020 challenger Joe Biden — was “perfect.”

Sekulow even echoed Trump’s language throughout his presentation on Tuesday.

“[Democrats] are talking about perfectly lawful actions on their face, but they want to make it impeachable if it’s just a wrong idea inside the president’s head,” he said. “It is our position legally, the president at all times acted with perfect legal authority inquired of matters in our national interest.”

One of Trump’s lawyers, Eric Herschmann, made an argument that former President Barack Obama committed an “abuse of power” akin to the allegations against Trump when Obama was caught on a microphone telling then-Russian-president Dmitriy Medevedev he would have more “flexibility” on Russia policy after the 2012 election.

“The case against President Obama would have been far stronger than the allegations against President Trump,” Herschmann said.

Another Trump attorney, Pam Bondi, spent nearly an hour suggesting that Biden’s son Hunter was involved in a corrupt deal with a Ukrainian energy company. She presented no evidence that a crime had been committed but suggested it warranted investigation — into both Hunter and Joe Biden, who was spearheading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy at the time.

Democrats have called the charge baseless and argued that Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate it could only be meant to tarnish a rival he viewed as a political threat. And they noted, with rueful irony, that Trump used his own high-profile impeachment trial to mount the innuendo-laden investigation he initially asked Ukraine to perform. A Ukrainian investigation into Biden was never announced, as allegedly sought by Trump’s allies; but all of the major networks spent hours airing the Trump legal team’s arguments.

And Jane Raskin, who also served on Trump’s defense team in the Mueller inquiry, used her speech primarily to sing the praises of Rudy Giuliani, a central figure in Democrats’ impeachment case. She contrasted him with the House’s lead impeachment manager, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), whom she portrayed as the loser in both the Mueller and impeachment cases.

“The score is, Mayor Giuliani 4, Mr. Schiff 0,” Raskin said.

But it was Sekulow’s final speech — the last full presentation in Trump’s entire defense — that became a sort of grand finale of Trump’s grievances, a speech that appeared geared toward his client as opposed to the audience of Senate Republicans looking for reasons to vote to acquit. Some senators left the chamber seemingly bewildered by the performance and tone

Sekulow lashed out at the FBI over a recent inspector-general report that attorneys there abused their authority to obtain a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign aide. He slammed former FBI director James Comey for leaking memos to a New York Times reporter meant to spur the appointment of a special counsel and which resulted in the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. And he devoted time to a complaint that Mueller’s team lost text messages between two agents who shared anti-Trump sentiments.

All of it, he said, should be factors in Trump’s acquittal — or else constitutional order in the U.S. would be permanently damaged.

“Danger. Danger. Danger,” he said, part of a refrain he repeated five times. “To lower the bar of impeachment, based on these articles of impeachment, would impact the functioning of our constitutional republic and the framework of that Constitution for generations.”

Democrats contended that the scattershot attacks on Trump’s perceived political enemies suggested a lack of confidence in their overall defense of the president on the Ukraine charge.

“The president’s lawyers today and in the prior presentations really did not, cannot defend the president on the facts,” Schiff told reporters Tuesday. “Instead they used their time on the floor today to go through a list of grievances which I’m sure the president was delighted to hear, but nonetheless, not particularly relevant to the charges against the president here today.”

Jesse Naranjo contributed to this report.

Trump’s defense team and his Republican allies have argued against the inclusion of witnesses at impeachment trialRepublicans do not yet have the needed votes to block witnesses from appearing at the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told his caucus in a meeting on Tuesday night, according to multiple reports.With an unknown number of Republican senators still undecided on the question of calling witnesses, McConnell could still get the votes he needs to block witnesses and stop the trial from reeling off into unpredictable – and potentially hazardous – territory for the president. At least four Republicans would need to join Democrats to force witness testimony.Trump’s defense team and his Republican allies have argued vehemently against the inclusion of witnesses at the trial, saying they already had enough information to decide the case and that the Senate should not be burdened by what they have framed as an incomplete process in the House of Representatives.But those arguments appear not to have been persuasive to the necessary number of senators. Trump’s lawyers concluded their opening arguments on Tuesday.Led by Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, the defense team dismissed objections to Trump’s conduct towards Ukraine as “policy disagreements” and warned senators not to “lower the bar of impeachment” by voting to convict the president.The defense team briefly grappled with charges reportedly appearing in an unpublished manuscript written by the former national security adviser John Bolton that Trump had conditioned security aid for Ukraine on the delivery of personal political favors.Even if Trump did that, his lawyers said, it would not be impeachable. But reports about the Bolton book were in any case “inadmissible” as evidence, Sekulow argued, owing to the secondhand nature of those reports.“You cannot impeach a president based on an unsourced allegation,” Sekulow said. “Responding to an unpublished manuscript that maybe some reporters have an idea of maybe what it says – if you want to call that evidence, I don’t know what you want to call that – I’d call that inadmissible.”A two-thirds majority of voting senators is required to convict Trump. An acquittal, much more likely, could be voted on as early as Friday. In the final visible hurdle remaining between Trump and acquittal, senators planned to vote, also on Friday, on whether to call witnesses in the case.Before McConnell told his caucus that he was short on votes, Republicans had threatened to respond to witnesses called by Democrats with a call for witnesses whom Democrats say are irrelevant to the case but whom Trump has been very much focused on: former vice-president Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, the whistleblower whose complaint launched the impeachment inquiry and potentially others.Hearing from numerous witnesses could extend the impeachment trial, which began last week and so far has had a brief run by historical standards, into next month and potentially beyond.But if Sekulow’s argument sounded like a call for Bolton to testify, that was an aberration from the strong posture of the defense team against witnesses and in favor of ending the trial as quickly as possible.The White House was reportedly spreading the word to senators on Tuesday that calling Bolton or other witnesses would result in a court battle that would prolong the trial indefinitely. Republican senators were to meet on Tuesday afternoon to discuss strategy for the next phase of the trial, a two-day question period in which queries submitted by senators in writing will be read aloud by the chief justice, John Roberts, who is presiding.It is still far from certain that witnesses including Bolton will testify, but since Sunday night, when Bolton’s manuscript was first reported, some more moderate Republican senators have voiced openness to the prospect, a sticking point for congressional Democrats in the impeachment trial.“Certainly a few days ago [the chance of witnesses being called] was zero and now it’s something,” Republican strategist Rob Jesmer told the Guardian. “I think that will massively prolong the trial.”In a Quinnipiac poll released on Tuesday, 75% of registered voters responding said that witnesses should be allowed to testify in the impeachment trial, versus 20% who did not want witnesses. Support for witness testimony included 49% of Republicans.Congress was still digesting the news, reported by the New York Times on Sunday, that Bolton says Trump told him he wanted to keep withholding nearly $400m of security aid to Ukraine until officials there agreed to help investigate political rivals including former vice-president Joe Biden and his family.On Monday night, the New York Times returned to the well, reporting that in the forthcoming book The Room Where It Happened, Bolton writes that he told the attorney general, William Barr, he was concerned Trump was doing personal favors for autocratic foreign leaders.News of Bolton’s book has spurred some more moderate Republican senators – Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine – to signal openness to supporting the calling of witnesses. On Tuesday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said the “drip, drip, drip” of information from Bolton’s manuscript was “reminiscent of Watergate”, the scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.> The longer it goes on, the more likely that more new evidence will come out that further implicates the president> > Chuck SchumerSekulow found another construction to describe the impeachment proceedings in his closing statement on Tuesday: “Danger, danger, danger.”He said: “To lower the bar of impeachment based on these articles of impeachment would impact the functioning of our constitutional republic and the framework of that constitution for generations.“To have a removal of a president based on a policy dispute? That’s not what the framers intended.”While Trump’s lawyers have painted Trump’s alleged efforts to force the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Biden as a “policy”, Democrats have argued it amounted to election tampering, with the goal of providing Trump with a means to smear his potential 2020 rival.Trump’s defense team could be pressed during the next question period of the trial to explain why not hearing from Bolton personally is preferable to calling Bolton, who has pre-emptively agreed to testify, as a witness.

Moving on several fronts toward shoring up support for his reelection bid, President Donald Trump capped off a busy Tuesday by heaping praise on the newest Republican member of Congress and savaging Democrats he said are engaged in “demented hoaxes” like his impeachment trial. On the day his legal team wrapped up its opening arguments on the Senate floor, Trump spoke to an enthusiastic audience in New Jersey in support of Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who recently switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP after breaking ranks over impeachment.