Category: senatetrial

Pelosi slams Senate sham trial: ‘You can’t be acquitted’ if you don’t have witnesses

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hasn't played all her cards yet, and she's already declaring the Senate trial a sham. “I disagree with the idea that he could be acquitted," Pelosi told the South Florida Sun Sentinel Editorial Board on Friday. “You can’t be acquitted if you don’t have a trial, and you can’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and you don’t have documents."

Pelosi made the comments heading into a day of closing arguments in which Senate Republicans appeared poised for a vote to quash witness testimony entirely with an acquittal vote soon to follow. (That vote is now expected to be held next Wednesday, following the State of the Union.)

Pelosi also directed withering criticism at Trump's defense team. "To say in a proceeding in the Senate if a president thinks that his election is in the best interests of the country anything is justified," she said, referencing the argument made by Alan Dershowitz, "I don’t know how they have any integrity or respect left.” 

Pelosi said the argument was completely antithetical to the Constitution. “What you heard the president’s lawyer say so undermined what is a democracy, our republic, [by suggesting the Constitution’s] Article II says I can do whatever I want," she said. "No, it doesn’t. That’s not what the Constitution is about."

Pelosi also laid blame for the procedure squarely at Leader Mitch McConnell's feet. “The founders always had in their mind that there could be a rogue president, and that’s why they put guardrails in the Constitution. And impeachment," she noted. "But they probably didn’t figure we would have a rogue president and a rogue Mitch McConnell."

Pelosi said in the interview that House Democrats would continue their push in the courts for oversight and more subpoenas to be honored, “or else we have a monarchy.”

Pelosi clearly isn't finished yet. And given all the loose ends being left by Senate Republicans, she will almost surely spend the rest of 2020 pulling those threads. It's honestly a mystery that McConnell thinks he's going to get away without calling witnesses without Pelosi making life a living hell for Senate Republicans from here till November. 

Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff did everything right. The House managers are American heroes

Posted on by Mark Sumner

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi played this perfectly. Delaying the transmission of the articles of impeachment to the Senate generated exactly the desired extra attention to the moment and opened up the time necessary for critical new information to come out. And new information did come out. That information included John Bolton’s yes-he-did manuscript leaks, as well as a whole series of FOIA responses showing the desperate moves going on inside a White House scrambling to cover-up actions it knew were illegal.

Rep. Adam Schiff played this perfectly. Day in and day out, Schiff not only provided the Senate with a master class in presenting a case, but he also ended those days with speeches that called back to the best of American oratory. And while Schiff was delivering a live action remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the rest of the House management team absolutely had his back. Val Demings, Zoe Lofgren, and Hakeem Jeffries were standouts, but the whole crew pulled its weight and then some.

And that only makes what’s happening in the Senate today a thousand times more difficult.

I cannot imagine how hard it was for Adam Schiff and the rest of the House team to get up this morning. They went to the wall. Left it all on the field. Whatever metaphor for “did absolutely everything they could and then some” you prefer, it applies in this case. They worked hard. They did everything they could to save this nation, against impossible odds and in dire circumstances. They charged that hill and did not hold back for a moment.

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Still ahead of them are four hours of arguments about calling witnesses. Four hours made absolutely pointless by the declaration ahead of time of a Republican majority that they have already made their decision based on the fine legal tradition of We Don’t Give A Damn. To even make the House team come in on Friday and argue a case when Republicans have already forged Donald Trump’s crown is both a waste of time and cruel. Ted Cruz is surely looking forward to it.

Trump’s legal team could sleep through the final day. They could let Dershowitz call in from Miami to discuss underwear brands. They might even consider having Pam Bondi present a short course in “How to get away with obvious bribery,” but senators have already had that course. It’s called being a Republican in the Senate.

Papa, if Mitch McConnell sat down with that nice lady from Alaska and promised her hundreds of millions for her vote, is that impeachable?

No, my child. That’s how Republicans in the Senate work every f’ing day.

On Friday the House team will walk into a Senate whose Republican members has already decided to join Trump in his cover-up. Except that’s not even the right term. They’ve already decided that obstruction is valid tool for a White House that wants to end congressional oversight in full. Except … even that’s not enough. Because the Republican senators aren’t unaware of Trump’s actions, or even particularly concerned about who else finds out. They’re simply putting their loyalty to Trump over liberally, literally everything. 

They’ve decided they don’t care about obstruction. They don’t care about the elimination of their oversight authority. Because they’re not denying what Trump did. The final decision from the Republican Senate didn’t simply put a gun to the head of American democracy. It fired it.

Which doesn’t mean that they won’t come out of the Senate, after agreeing that Trump was guilty, and march right in front of Fox cameras to proclaim his total innocence. Of course they will. After all, it was a perfect call.

When the House impeachment managers come back to the other end of Capitol Hill, they should do so with heads held high. More than that, they should be met with trumpets. With flowers. With every plaudit that can be brought to genuine heroes of their nation. They should get a parade.

And then there should be another parade of people in the streets. In every street in the country.

Republicans agree Trump is guilty as charged, but they don’t care and will vote to cover it up

Posted on by Mark Sumner

The final night of questions and answers in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump has ended. And except for going through the final motions, it appears the same is true of the whole impeachment trial. In the final hour of the evening, as questions were pushed to both the House managers and Trump’s legal team, it became clear that the so-called moderate Republicans were not going to vote to actually hold a trial by calling witnesses. That was driven home when retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander and Alaska’s own Susan Collins Lite, Lisa Murkowski , joined with Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham to deliver a nail-in-the-coffin joint question to Trump’s team.

That question: Even if Trump did everything that was alleged, even if he set out to gain advantage in the 2020 election by extorting slander from a foreign government and squeezed that government by withholding military assistance in the middle of a hot war, would that be okay? Trump’s team, unsurprisingly, said that was fine. And then Alexander issued a statement agreeing with them. The night didn’t just end with the certainty that Trump will be acquitted, but with an agreement from Republicans in the U.S. Senate that he is free to do anything—anything—that he wants. It’s not just an acquittal; it’s a coronation. 

Throughout the evening, the House managers continued to make a plea for some form, any form, of sanity. As the night went on, Rep. Adam Schiff outlined a plan in which the House would agree to limit witness depositions to a single week. It would let Chief Justice John Roberts have first say over the appropriateness of every witness and every document. It would let the Republican-dominated Senate have veto power over Roberts’ decisions. It would hold depositions off the Senate floor so they didn’t take up the chamber’s time. It would agree to not try to fight any decision in court.

But on the other side, Trump’s team agreed to nothing. “With all due respect,” it wouldn’t let Roberts make any decisions. Or the Senate. It would fight every witness called by the House in court. It would call “dozens” of witnesses. It would demand that every decision be appealed, appealed again, and would not stop until every decision hit Roberts again, in his role at the Supreme Court. After repeatedly blaming the House for failing to reach “accommodations” with the White House team during the House hearings, Pat Philbin, Pat Cipollone, and Jay Sekulow made it brutally clear that they had no interest in reaching accommodation on anything. 

Just as they had done in the House, the members of Trump’s team didn’t just hint that they would turn any attempt to get witnesses into an agonizing slog through the courts that could not possibly be settled before the election; they said it. Repeatedly. That they would not cooperate on any point, and would consume the Senate’s schedule indefinitely, was their theme song.

Throughout the evening, the handful of Republican senators supposedly still having doubts was watched closely. It became obvious that Susan Collins had been given a hall pass allowing her to try to salvage her worst-in-the-nation popularity through the demonstration of yet another pointless vote. But that moment came during a break in which Murkowski and Alexander huddled together, and a final five-minute halt in the proceedings so McConnell could make sure that he had the guarantee of no witnesses nailed down. It was at that point that the two critical votes joined with the most blatant Trump sycophants in the Senate to demonstrate exactly where they were coming down.

Adam Schiff hurled himself into his next response, clear on what was happening and beginning with, “Let me blunt.” He was. He explained exactly what it meant for Republicans to vote against witnesses, and to do so in the way they were indicating they would. It meant an absolute abdication of the Senate’s oversight role, and the over to Trump of power so great that “imperial presidency” is not a powerful enough term to describe it. Then Trump’s team handled a final response from a large group, making it clear they understood fully. When the final question reached the House team, it was Jerry Nadler who took it rather than a clearly exhausted, disgusted, and heart-sore Schiff.

Shortly after the session ended, Lamar Alexander issued a statement making it clear that he was indeed siding with Trump, on the worst possible grounds. He didn’t dispute the case that the House had brought. Far from it. Alexander said there was no need to bring in witnesses to prove that Trump had extorted slander, had threatened an ally in the midst of battle, and had schemed to put his own interests above the national interest. Alexander found all that worthy of the patented “moderate Republican” tsk-tsk. Then he left the national stage saying that, even though he believed all that was true, it still wasn’t something to do anything about.

Some time this morning, Lisa Murkowski is expected to deliver her own statement of tribute.

After all the talk, the dispute came down to one small point: Adam Schiff kept telling the Senate that Donald Trump is not a king. Republicans disagreed.

Rand Paul is determined to show that he is more vile than anyone else in Congress

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts read more than 80 questions that had been submitted to him by lawmakers in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. That included questions that were long enough to include whole right-wing conspiracy theories and multiple questions that included the names of people who appear in no document in the whole investigation, but whom Republicans accuse of being involved in a conspiracy involving John Bolton and the whistleblower. 

But there was one question that Roberts refused to read—a question from Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, who intentionally placed in his question the name that right-wing publications have insisted is that of the whistleblower. Roberts refused to read the question. And today Paul is going to do it again.

From the very beginning, the whistleblower made it clear that he or she was not a firsthand witness to events but had only been told about actions that were reasons for concern. Based on that information, the whistleblower raised those concerns with the intelligence community inspector general. Then, following the strict instructions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, the whistleblower contacted a specific staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, who instructed the whistleblower in the next appropriate step.

All of this is defined by law. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff has made it clear that he did not meet with the whistleblower. He has made it clear that he does not know the whistleblower’s name. He has also made it clear that his staff did not assist in preparing the whistleblower’s complaint or provide any research to the whistleblower, or offer any assistance whatsoever beyond the instructions that are required by the law—a law that has, in the past, been strongly supported by Republicans.

There is no evidence, none whatsoever, that Schiff or anyone on his staff did the slightest thing wrong in regard to the whistleblower.

There is no evidence, none whatsoever, that the whistleblower took any step that was not strictly legal, strictly moral, and strictly out of concern for the nation.

There is absolutely no doubt that what Rand Paul is doing is petty, vile, mean-spirited, and definitively evil, with no intent but to bring harm to an individual who acted entirely within the law.

On Thursday, Paul has already declared that he is going to do it again. And if what he accomplishes from this is the ruin of someone who was doing their best for the nation—or the ruin of someone who is not the whistleblower, since the name Paul is using came from no official source—he’s perfectly okay with that.

What should senators ask in the last eight hours of the impeachment Q&A?

Posted on by Mark Sumner

A republic, if you can keep it. A republic, if you can keep it. A republic, if you can keep It. A republic … until Friday.

Republicans in the Senate are set to vote not just that Donald Trump can get away with extorting a foreign government into interfering in the 2020 election, but that such an act isn’t even worthy of their time. They have, sniff, important things to do. As a demonstration of their disdain for democracy, while Republicans prepare to press the plunger on our old friend the Fascism Watch, they’re indulging themselves by burning up the final Q&A session of democracy by asking questions that aren’t questions at all, but just a head start on smearing political opponents.

So with eight hours left before Republicans provide a definitive “No, you can’t” to Benjamin Franklin’s much-quoted remark, this seems like a good time to ponder: What are the right questions to ask, here at the end of all things?

On Wednesday, the eight hours of questions in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump were more than a little agonizing. Democrats—both senators and the House impeachment managers—stayed in there and kept up the pretense that all of this still means something. Exhausted as they all must be at this point, Adam Schiff was still swinging for the fences on every response, and the other members of the team—Jason Crow, Val Demings, Sylvia Garcia, Hakeem Jeffries, Zoe Lofgren, and Jerry Nadler—continued on amazingly undaunted.

Meanwhile, across the aisle, Republicans were engaged in a snickerfest, with Ted Cruz and company stopping just short of handing John Roberts a question to read on the legal position of I.C. Wiener. In fact, considering that Rand Paul authored one note that Roberts refused to read, it could have been worse.

But if Cruz’s parade of “Is Joe Biden just evil, or is he also the evil master of the evil whistleblower?” questions are what America doesn’t need as the ship of state circles the whirlpool, what are the right questions? What notes should senators be dropping in Roberts’ hands that could still embarrass the unembarrassable, shine a light in the smoggy darkness, and maybe snatch at least a hint of victory back from the jaws of corruption?

What question would you ask, if you had the opportunity? If you were in the Senate chamber today and could pass just one note up to John Roberts, knowing that a vote to end democracy is 24 hours away, what would you want him to say? Could you save the nation ... or at least give the people drowning it one last middle finger as we’re going down?

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Alan Dershowitz jumps in to attack the ridiculous theories of legal muttonhead Alan Dershowitz

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Alan Dershowitz may have kept his underwear on in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump—though, thankfully, we do not know that one way or the other. What he didn’t keep was any pretense that his “constitutional scholarship” went beyond the ability to say “James Madison” while providing a defense of nothing less than overt fascism.

In a series of appearances, Dershowitz declared that there’s nothing wrong with a president using the federal government to launch investigations of opponents, nothing wrong with a president extorting political assistance from a foreign government, and in fact nothing at all forbidden to a president clinging to power. Nothing.

It was such an amazing statement that it generated immediate concern—from everyone except Republican senators who who will vote to endorse that theory on Friday. But now Dershowitz’s embrace of unbounded authoritarianism is under assault from a new source: Alan Dershowitz.

On Thursday morning, Dershowitz—clothing status unknown—tweeted that when he said a president could never be impeached for abuse of power, that a president was perfectly justified in using his office to persecute opponents, and that there were no limits on what a president could do to cling to power … people were taking it the wrong way.

“They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything,” complained the attorney of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. “I said nothing like that, as anyone who actually heard what I said can attest.”

Well, it’s certainly a good thing that Mitch McConnell’s personally controlled camera was fixed on Dershowitz during his appearance so that these slanderous accounts can be cleared up.

What did Dershowitz really say? Well, there was the part where he discussed what a president could demand, from anyone, including foreign governments, in exchange for political help against opponents.

If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

If that wasn’t clear enough, Dershowitz walked through scenarios to make it clear that, no matter how severe the action, there was nothing, nothing, nothing off the table. All it takes is anything that creates the slightest possibility of mixed motives … even if the “good” part of that mixture is unlimited hubris.

’I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. And if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.’ That cannot be an impeachable offense.

And rather than suggesting that it was an issue for the president to use his power to solicit—or order—investigations into political opponents, Dershowitz made the case that, because Joe Biden is a candidate, Trump can put him under additional scrutiny.

The fact that he’s announced his candidacy is a very good reason for upping the interest in his son.

If the media is reporting that Dershowitz said a president can do anything to maintain their own power, and a president can use that power to persecute opponents, it’s because he did. No matter what Alan Dershowitz says.

And when the Senate votes on Friday, it’s exactly these theories that it’ll be voting on.

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Senate Republicans make clear: It’s not about Ukraine. It’s about ending American democracy for good

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Wednesday, the Senate conducted the first of two days of question-and-answer in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, with the House managers and Trump’s legal team. Throughout the sessions, Trump’s team made it clear that any attempt to get at the truth of what happened would result in retaliation in the form of asking for an endless stream of witnesses, fighting every request in court, and holding up activity in the Senate “for a very long time.” Meanwhile, the House managers continued to swing for the fences with a number of stirring moments, sharp responses, and ringing calls for the Senate to do its job for the country.

From the start of this session, it was clear that Republicans were not taking the day seriously. Confident that enough of their members had fallen in line to suppress any possibility of subpoenaing a witness, the Republican side indulged in question after question written for no other reason than to promote conspiracy theories and smears by having Chief Justice John Roberts read them aloud. But even that wasn’t the worst damage done during the course of the evening.

As the night wore on, Trump legal team member Alan Dershowitz rose repeatedly to make it very clear what Republicans were authorizing: They were not just embracing foreign interference, but literally allowing Donald Trump to do anything in pursuit of reelection.

Much of the evening seemed to be the Ted Cruz Show. Having abandoned any pretense that they were seeking information, Republicans allowed the Texas assassin to have a hand in at least eight questions, all of them designed to spread ridiculous, corrosive smears against the whistleblower, Rep. Adam Schiff, and former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump’s defense team joined in eagerly, citing information from the worst of right-wing sites as “public information” to justify repeating claims. By the end of the night, Senate Republicans had endorsed every aspect of the conspiracy theory that Trump had tried to extort from Ukraine, and they had gone on to indict the whistleblower as having a hand in the “double bribery.”

Again and again, Republicans such as Cruz and Josh Hawley demonstrated that they were laughing up their sleeves, playing the “Roberts will repeat anything” game. That included using questions to make statements that Adam Schiff had collaborated with the whistleblower, long after Schiff had explained—again—that he had not met the whistleblower, that he did not know the whistleblower, and that no member of his staff was involved in preparing the whistleblower’s complaint. It didn’t matter, because for Cruz, getting out the facts was never the point of the exercise.

A special award goes to Kentucky Republican Rand Paul. At one point in the late afternoon, he managed to concoct a question so vile that Roberts refused to read it—the only time that happened, even though some of the questions from Cruz included recitations of multiple false charges.

Trump’s team leaned into the chance to spread unfounded information. Despite hours and days of chest-beating over “hearsay” or “second-hand information,” Trump’s attorneys relished every word of the beyond-Q conspiracies that came their way (including a rare appearance from benchwarmer Pam Bondi so bad that it’s already gathered more than two million views). And when not rolling in vile claims with absolutely no foundation, they used much of their time to directly threaten the Senate, stating again and again that any attempt to call a witness would be met with an unending string of requests, privilege claims, and court fights. 

In the middle of the evening, Schiff made a major play and said that, to expedite the process, the House managers would agree to be bound by decisions from Roberts when it came to validating subpoenas, authorizing witnesses, and requesting documents. Citing the way that the House had taken as many as five depositions in a week, Schiff made it clear that there was no reason that a process involving witnesses had to be lengthy. But Trump’s legal team said that it would not agree. Instead, it continued its threat to respond to any call for witnesses by wrecking the Senate, drowning the trial in frivolous requests, and demanding a string of witnesses (including every member of the Biden family, every House manager, the whistleblower, people cited in right-wing media … an unending parade). And Republicans on both sides of the table pretended that this threat wasn’t simply an argument that any legal process can be crushed by the power of the White House.

But it wasn’t the cudgel of delay, or the giggling efforts of Cruz, Hawley, Paul, and others to place their hands under Robert’s robe and make him talk that did the most damage. The worst damage to the evening, the trial, and America’s future came from doddering Alan Dershowitz, who used the evening to expand his previous defense to a degree that didn’t just exonerate Trump in this case, but also exonerated him in any possible case. 

In a pair of appearances, Dershowitz expanded on his theory that abuse of power isn’t a permissible cause for impeachment. Deliberately and directly contradicting the historical sources he cited, Dershowitz called every constitutional expert in America a “never Trumper” for daring to disagree with him. And while claiming to be the only reasonable man in the country, he said he didn’t stand alone … because he had found a single attorney in 1867 whose views were similar. And 1867 is closer to when the Constitution was written, so that view wins. If you ignore all the people involved in the writing of it.

Then, having literally made up dictionary entries to support his redefinition of legal terms, Dershowitz went not just all-in, but completely overboard. According to Trump’s finest legal mind, there is nothing that Trump can’t do in pursuit of reelection. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. So long as Trump believes that his reelection would be good for the nation, he can extort foreign governments for made-up dirt. He can directly threaten an ally. There is no limit.

Along the way, Dershowitz also argued that there is absolutely nothing wrong with launching an investigation into a political opponent. In fact, he asserted that a run for office itself can be justification for investigating an opponent. He directly embraced the idea that a president launching investigations of his political opponents using domestic or foreign sources wasn’t just fine; it was desirable. He argued that daring to run against Trump painted a target on anyone’s back, and that Trump had all the power he needed to shoot at it.

If there was any doubt going into the evening, Dershowitz removed it: voting to acquit Trump means voting not just to dismiss this charge, but to embrace the idea that Trump trumps the law. He didn’t hint that Trump could do anything he wanted in pursuit of reelection; that was the core theme of his whole presentation. That was the point. That was what he said.

The Senate listened to a presentation from Trump’s legal team according to which there is nothing Trump can do in pursuit of reelection that isn’t justified. There is no limit to how Trump can use his power to persecute political opponents. According to the theory that was put forward on the floor of the Senate, Trump could simply lock up every Democratic opponent, or suspend elections indefinitely, and that would be just fine—not only an impeachable offense, but a good thing.

Republicans are going to vote for that. Republicans are going to press the button on not just a step toward autocracy, but a full-on embrace of it. They’re going to do it with a smile.

Republicans have surrendered on Trump’s guilt. They’re making a last stand with ‘So what if he did?’

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Reporting on whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has secured enough support to shut down the possibility of witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump is all over the map. Some reports have insisted that “10 or 12” Republicans are actually looking fearfully at the overwhelming public opinion in favor of witnesses, while other reports have been just as insistent that McConnell has waved enough head-pikes to successfully keep rebellion clear of dastardly facts.

But whether or not Bolton ever takes the stand in the Senate, one thing has become absolutely clear: Republicans have completely given up on the idea of claiming that Donald Trump did not extort Ukraine to gain a personal political advantage. Forget the “perfect call.” Republicans up and down the line may still be afraid to gain the Twit-ire of Trump by declaring his guilt, but the official position has moved completely away from the idea that Trump did nothing wrong and solidly into camp “So what?”

To see where Republicans are takes no more than reading the first sentence of this quote from Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana: “Let’s say it’s true, okay? Dershowitz last night explained that if you’re looking at it from a constitutional point of view, that that is not something that is impeachable.” The explanation of Alan Dershowitz, a criminal attorney playing constitutional expert on TV (with underwear on), was clearly ridiculous on its face, and hundreds of experts have said so explicitly.

But the terrible fact for a Republican Party facing a severe fact shortage is that the public is more easily confused on this point than they are on Trump’s guilt. In other words, every real constitutional expert in the nation is united around the idea that abuse of power and obstruction of justice are valid reasons for a politician to be impeached and removed. But it’s easier to pretend that that is not true than it is to keep pretending that Donald Trump did not commit extortion in the face of not just Bolton’s testimony, but also the mass of evidence presented by House managers.

Bolton’s evidence may be the tipping point, but Republicans are aware that the case against Trump has been both overwhelming and compelling from the outset—which is why the “defense” of Trump was primarily focused not on proving his innocence, but on pretending that extorting foreign involvement in an election is a perfectly valid activity.

Now, no matter how Republicans eventually vote, no matter how hard Trump tries to suppress Bolton’s manuscript, it’s clear enough that this information is going to come out. Which makes it absolutely pointless to defend Trump on the basis that he did nothing wrong.

That’s why even Lindsey Graham has given up on sticking his fingers in his ears and pretending that he has heard no evidence against Trump. Instead, Graham says, “For the sake of argument, one could assume everything attributable to John Bolton is accurate and still the House case would fall well below the standards to remove a president from office.”

”Let’s say it’s true, okay?” says Braun. ”For the sake of argument,” says Graham. If there have ever been bigger verbal white flags, they were probably waved on a battleship where someone was signing a treaty of surrender.

Republicans aren’t going to the “So what?” position because they feel it’s strong. They know it’s not strong. They’re going there because it is all they have left.

Ted Cruz: “Quid pro quo doesn’t matter. It’s a red herring. It doesn’t matter if there was a quid pro quo or not.”

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Trump’s defense: If he did it that’s okay, the other guy had it coming, and also you can’t prove it

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Wednesday begins the period of questioning in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. But as the senators ponder whether Chief Justice John Roberts will be more inclined to read questions in which the i’s are dotted with little hearts, it’s worth taking one final look at the defense of Donald Trump, which closed out yesterday on final statements from primary counsels Pat Philbin, Jay Sekulow, and Pat Cipollone. And here was their argument:

Philbin talked about how abuse of power and obstruction were not impeachable offenses. Sekulow complained about the Mueller investigation and hatred for Trump. Cipollone noted that Democrats had previously objected to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Notice anything missing from this defense? Like … a defense?

As Trump’s team finished out its case on Tuesday afternoon, Jay Sekulow’s hour-plus ramble through the sad underdog life of Donald Trump was surely the attention-grabber. In an address that went everywhere but to Trump’s actions in Ukraine, Sekulow was ludicrously over-the-top in painting a picture of a Trump who couldn’t take a step without an assault from James Comey, or Nellie Ohr, or nefarious foreign agent Christopher Steele. Sekulow’s speech name-dropped every Q-related conspiracy while following a course more tangled than a family-sized linguine.

But when the final day of the defense was tacked onto the rest, there’s a really striking feature of Trump’s defense that makes it stand out—not just from other impeachment trials, but from trials of any sort. Where was the defense in this defense?

Over the course of three abbreviated days, the idea that Trump didn’t do it barely got a mention. A portion of the sessions on Monday was devoted to showing that, by carefully preventing Congress from obtaining key witnesses and all documents, Trump had successfully left holes that had to be filled in by nothing more than reason and evidence. And there was a token effort to present the idea that Trump could have had other motivations for his actions, not a personal vendetta. But these were side issues.

Trump’s legal team spent far more time on two topics that were definitely not a defense of Trump’s innocence. The first of these was “Joe Biden had it coming.” Using a complete inversion of the facts, Trump’s legal team didn’t just defend conspiracy theories concerning Biden and his son; it knowingly and deliberately lied about the legal situation in Ukraine and the testimony of Ukrainian officials. These lies were met with joyful acceptance by Republican senators, who exited the chamber to show that Trump never needed to outsource that kind of attack, when good old American slander was available at half the price.

But Trump’s legal team used the biggest chunk of time arguing that abuse of power and obstruction of justice are not impeachable offenses. That subject took up part of Saturday; it was the only topic of criminal attorney Alan Dershowitz’s marathon walk through the names of constitutional framers on Monday evening, and it was the sole topic of Philbin’s notes on closing day.

When put together in order of time assigned, the Trump defense broke down to:

It’s not really a crime anyway. Joe Biden had it coming. There could have been reasons. You can’t prove it.

That’s an extraordinary inversion of the usual course of a legal defense (if not quite a musical number from Chicago). If a legal defense team in a murder trial came into a courtroom to argue, Murder is not a crime, the victim deserved it, there were good reasons for the death, and hey, those knife wounds could have come from anywhere … that wouldn’t be regarded as a particularly acceptable defense.

Especially if the wrap-up was, “And your honor, that’s why we can’t allow in any firsthand witnesses.”

Trump’s legal team closed out his ‘defense’ by showing that it had no defense

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s legal team stood before the Senate to give its closing argument … and discovered it didn’t have one. Instead, Pat Philbin spent half an hour adding some footnotes to Alan Dershowitz’s Monday night muddle. Pat Cipollone devoted 10 minutes to running some 20-year-old video of Democratic representatives complaining about Bill Clinton’s impeachment. And Jay Sekulow provided America with an hour of television too incoherent even for Alex Jones.

Sekulow’s final speech wasn’t so much an argument as it was the world’s angriest tone poem, a dissociative spew that drew from more conspiracy theories than four seasons of X-Files. And if it sometimes seemed that Sekulow was channeling the robot from Lost in Space, he was most definitely lost. But Sekulow did have a theme: Why won’t everyone stop picking on Donald Trump?

James Comey, Nellie Ohr, FISA warrant, Senate floor Foreign agent, Robert Mueller, Crossfire Hurricane   Peter Strzok, phone text, CrowdStrike, what’s next? Whistleblower, Lisa Page, they don’t know in Ukraine   Adam Schiff, Hamilton, “Danger” is back again, John Bolton, Manuscript, Inadmissible   Trump’s shoes, FBI, investigate the sad guy Dossier, filed away, what else is there left to say?  

Well … quite a lot, actually. Sekulow’s speech wasn’t rambling or inarticulate so much as simply pointless. He touched on more conspiracy theories than can be composed by a whole alphabet of secret Twitter sources, but even when accepting such ideas as Joe Biden being corrupt, or Donald Trump being the downtrodden underdog, Sekulow failed to knit the threads together into something that looked more organized than dryer lint. If Adam Schiff gave a moving speech for the ages, and he did, Sekulow’s coda didn’t merit a moment.

Mostly, what Sekulow achieved in an hour was the same thing his compatriots managed in a much shorter period—a statement that he had nothing. That there was no defense of Trump’s actions. That there was no answer to the challenges posed by new evidence. And he demonstrated that Donald Trump selects lawyers by loyalty, not competence.

Not one of Trump’s attorneys could produce anything that looked like a closing argument. Because that first requires an argument.