Trump defence team lobs Democrats' charges back on them

Washington

US President Donald Trump's legal defence team mounted an aggressive offence on Saturday as it opened its side in the Senate impeachment trial by attacking his Democratic accusers as partisan witch-hunters trying to remove him from office because they could not beat him at the ballot box.

After three days of arguments by the House managers prosecuting Mr Trump for high crimes and misdemeanours, the president's lawyers presented the senators with a radically different view of the facts and the Constitution, seeking to turn the Democrats' charges back on them while denouncing the whole process as illegitimate.

Pat A Cipollone, the White House counsel, said of the House managers: "They're asking you to tear up all of the ballots all across the country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people."

"They're here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history, and we can't allow that to happen," he added.

The president's team spent only two of the 24 hours allotted to them so that senators could leave town for the weekend before the defence presentation resumes on Monday, but it was the first time his lawyers have formally made a case for him since the House opened its inquiry in September. The goal was to poke holes in the House managers' arguments in order to provide enough fodder to Senate Republicans already inclined to acquit him.

While less combative than their famously combustible client, the lawyers relentlessly assailed the prosecution's interpretation of events, accusing House Democrats of cherry-picking the facts and leaving out contrary information to construct a skewed narrative. They maintained that none of what the Democrats presented the Senate justified the first eviction of a president from the White House in American history.

"They have the burden of proof," Mr Cipollone said, "and they have not come close to meeting it."

After the session, Democrats contended that the White House arguments actually bolstered their demand to call witnesses like John Bolton, the president's former national security adviser, and Mick Mulvaney, his acting White House chief of staff, as well as require documents be turned over, all of which the Republican majority so far has rejected.

"They kept saying there are no eyewitness accounts," Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters. "But there are people that have eyewitness accounts. The very four witnesses, and the very four sets of documents that we have asked for."

The abbreviated weekend session wrapped up five days of presentations and arguments on the Senate floor in the country's third presidential impeachment trial. With Mr Trump's fate on the line, the trial, unfolding less than 10 months before he faces re-election, has come to encapsulate the pitched three-year struggle that has consumed Washington since he took office determined to disrupt the existing order, at times in ways that crossed long-standing lines.

While he did not attend Saturday's opening of his defence, as he had previously suggested he might, Mr Trump watched from the White House and weighed in on Twitter with attacks on prominent Democrats including Senator Schumer, Representative Adam B Schiff of California, the lead prosecutor for Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, portraying the day as a chance to put them on trial instead.

"Our case against lyin', cheatin', liddle' Adam 'Shifty' Schiff, Cryin' Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrat Party, starts today at 10:00 A.M.," he wrote.

With the odds stacked against him in the Democratic-run House, he refused to send lawyers to participate in Judiciary Committee hearings last month, complaining that he was not given due process. But he faced a more receptive audience in the Senate, where the White House has been working in tandem with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader.

Even after the prosecution's presentation, Mr Trump appeared certain to win acquittal in a trial that requires the support of two-thirds of senators for conviction. So the main priority for his legal team as it opened its arguments was not to undermine its own advantage or give wavering moderate Republican senators reasons to support Democratic requests for witnesses and documents.

A vote on that question will not come until this week, and it remained the central question of the impeachment trial - with the potential to either prolong the process and yield new revelations that could further damage the president, or bring the proceeding to a swift conclusion.

But after long days of exhaustive arguments by the House managers, there was little indication that there would be enough Republican support to consider new evidence.

Republican senators seemed relieved to finally have the president's side of the debate presented on the floor.

"They completely undermined the case of the Democrats and truly undermined the credibility of Adam Schiff," Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told reporters afterward.

Mr 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 US$400 million in congressionally approved security aid, a decision that a government agency called a violation of law.

The House managers have argued the president's actions amounted to a corrupt scheme to invite foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election, and part of a dangerous pattern of behaviour by Mr Trump of using the machinery of government for his own benefit.

But Mr Cipollone belittled the weight of the allegations, suggesting the Constitution's framers had in mind something more consequential when they created the impeachment clause than what the House managers had presented.

"They've come here today and they've basically said, 'Let's cancel an election over a meeting with the Ukraine'," he said.

The president's lawyers maintained that he had every right to set foreign policy as he saw fit and that he had valid concerns about corruption in Ukraine and burden-sharing with Europe that prompted him to suspend the aid temporarily.

They also argued that he was protecting presidential prerogatives when he refused to allow aides to testify or provide documents in the House proceedings. NYTIMES