The president’s legal team completed its impeachment defense and Republicans huddled to discuss whether to call new witnesses.
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transcript
transcript
Impeachment Highlights: Trump’s Lawyers End Opening Arguments
President Trump’s lawyers finished their oral arguments, leaving senators the chance to ask questions of each side in the impeachment trial.
“The trial of the leader of the free world, and the duly elected president of the United States, it is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts. That’s politics, unfortunately. And Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. You cannot impeach a president on an unsourced allegation. ”“ The American people are entitled to choose their president. Overturning the last election, and massively interfering with the upcoming one would cause serious and lasting damage to the people of the United States, and to our great country. The Senate cannot allow this to happen. It is time for this to end, here and now. ”
“The trial of the leader of the free world, and the duly elected president of the United States, it is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts. That’s politics, unfortunately. And Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. You cannot impeach a president on an unsourced allegation. ”“ The American people are entitled to choose their president. Overturning the last election, and massively interfering with the upcoming one would cause serious and lasting damage to the people of the United States, and to our great country. The Senate cannot allow this to happen. It is time for this to end, here and now. ”
“The trial of the leader of the free world, and the duly elected president of the United States, it is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts. That’s politics, unfortunately. And Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. You cannot impeach a president on an unsourced allegation. ”“ The American people are entitled to choose their president. Overturning the last election, and massively interfering with the upcoming one would cause serious and lasting damage to the people of the United States, and to our great country. The Senate cannot allow this to happen. It is time for this to end, here and now. ”
President Trump’s lawyers finished their oral arguments, leaving senators the chance to ask questions of each side in the impeachment trial. Credit
Credit … TJ Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
Jan. ,
17: 11 pm ET
WASHINGTON – President Trump’s defense team appealed to the Senate on Tuesday to disregard a new account by the former national security adviser John R. Bolton that bolsters the impeachment case against the president. But by day’s end, Republican leaders working feverishly to block testimony from Mr. Bolton or other witnesses indicated they had not yet corralled the votes to do so.
On the final day of arguments on Mr. Trump’s behalf, Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s private lawyers, sought to raise doubts about Mr. Bolton’s claim in an unpublished manuscript that Mr. Trump tied the release of military aid to Ukraine to investigations into his political rivals, calling it an “unsourced allegation” that was “inadmissible” in his impeachment trial.
Just after Mr. Trump’s team ended a three-day legal defense, Republican senators rushed into a private meeting room in the Capitol, where Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, worked to herd his rank and file in line behind ending the trial without witnesses.
He carried a card that bore a tally of Republican votes on the question, and warned that he did not yet have enough to block an expected move to call witnesses because some Republicans remained uncommitted, according to people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
“It was a serious family discussion,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, told reporters as he emerged from the senators-only meeting in the Strom Thurmond Room. “Some people are sincerely exploring all the avenues.”
But behind the scenes, key Republicans said they were confident confident they could bring the trial to an end, and they described Mr. McConnell’s comments as a pointed signal that it was time for rank-and-file senators to fall in line.
Image
Senator Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he did not have the votes to block Democrats from calli ng witnesses during the impeachment trial. Credit … Erin Schaff / The New York Times
The talks unfolded after Mr. Trump’s team essentially rested its case against removing him from office, ending oral arguments by urging senators to ignore what Mr. Bolton might have to say. Without directly denying the veracity of his account, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times , Mr. Sekulow argued that the behavior Mr. Bolton described had no place in the discussion of the president’s fate.
Impeachment “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Mr. Sekulow said. “That is politics, unfortunately. Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. ”
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
President Trump’s lawyers finished their oral arguments, leaving senators the chance to ask questions of each side in the impeachment trial. Credit
Credit … TJ Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
Jan. ,
- 17: 11 pm ET
WASHINGTON – President Trump’s defense team appealed to the Senate on Tuesday to disregard a new account by the former national security adviser John R. Bolton that bolsters the impeachment case against the president. But by day’s end, Republican leaders working feverishly to block testimony from Mr. Bolton or other witnesses indicated they had not yet corralled the votes to do so.
On the final day of arguments on Mr. Trump’s behalf, Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s private lawyers, sought to raise doubts about Mr. Bolton’s claim in an unpublished manuscript that Mr. Trump tied the release of military aid to Ukraine to investigations into his political rivals, calling it an “unsourced allegation” that was “inadmissible” in his impeachment trial.
Just after Mr. Trump’s team ended a three-day legal defense, Republican senators rushed into a private meeting room in the Capitol, where Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, worked to herd his rank and file in line behind ending the trial without witnesses.
He carried a card that bore a tally of Republican votes on the question, and warned that he did not yet have enough to block an expected move to call witnesses because some Republicans remained uncommitted, according to people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
“It was a serious family discussion,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, told reporters as he emerged from the senators-only meeting in the Strom Thurmond Room. “Some people are sincerely exploring all the avenues.”
But behind the scenes, key Republicans said they were confident confident they could bring the trial to an end, and they described Mr. McConnell’s comments as a pointed signal that it was time for rank-and-file senators to fall in line.
Image
Senator Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he did not have the votes to block Democrats from calli ng witnesses during the impeachment trial. Credit … Erin Schaff / The New York Times
The talks unfolded after Mr. Trump’s team essentially rested its case against removing him from office, ending oral arguments by urging senators to ignore what Mr. Bolton might have to say. Without directly denying the veracity of his account, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times , Mr. Sekulow argued that the behavior Mr. Bolton described had no place in the discussion of the president’s fate.
Impeachment “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Mr. Sekulow said. “That is politics, unfortunately. Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. ”
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
Image
Senator Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he did not have the votes to block Democrats from calli ng witnesses during the impeachment trial. Credit … Erin Schaff / The New York Times
The talks unfolded after Mr. Trump’s team essentially rested its case against removing him from office, ending oral arguments by urging senators to ignore what Mr. Bolton might have to say. Without directly denying the veracity of his account, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times , Mr. Sekulow argued that the behavior Mr. Bolton described had no place in the discussion of the president’s fate.
Impeachment “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Mr. Sekulow said. “That is politics, unfortunately. Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. ”
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
Senator Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he did not have the votes to block Democrats from calli ng witnesses during the impeachment trial. Credit … Erin Schaff / The New York Times
The talks unfolded after Mr. Trump’s team essentially rested its case against removing him from office, ending oral arguments by urging senators to ignore what Mr. Bolton might have to say. Without directly denying the veracity of his account, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times , Mr. Sekulow argued that the behavior Mr. Bolton described had no place in the discussion of the president’s fate.
Impeachment “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Mr. Sekulow said. “That is politics, unfortunately. Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. ”
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
The talks unfolded after Mr. Trump’s team essentially rested its case against removing him from office, ending oral arguments by urging senators to ignore what Mr. Bolton might have to say. Without directly denying the veracity of his account, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times , Mr. Sekulow argued that the behavior Mr. Bolton described had no place in the discussion of the president’s fate.
Impeachment “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Mr. Sekulow said. “That is politics, unfortunately. Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. ”
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
The talks unfolded after Mr. Trump’s team essentially rested its case against removing him from office, ending oral arguments by urging senators to ignore what Mr. Bolton might have to say. Without directly denying the veracity of his account, whose existence was first 
reported by The New York Times , Mr. Sekulow argued that the behavior Mr. Bolton described had no place in the discussion of the president’s fate.
Impeachment “is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Mr. Sekulow said. “That is politics, unfortunately. Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray. ”
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
The argument was a bid to quiet the anger and anxiety that Mr. Bolton’s revelation prompted in Republican ranks when it emerged on Sunday at a critical stage in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Conservatives said the case for moving directly to acquittal without new testimony or documents was overwhelming, but key moderates, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said they were still undecided.
Two Republicans, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said they would most likely vote for witnesses, but Democrats would need four Republicans to join them in order to prevail. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, indicated earlier in the day that “Mr. Bolton probably has some things that would be helpful for us. ”
Inside the private meeting on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell and his allies warned that allowing witnesses would blow the trial wide open and potentially prolong it by weeks. Clutching his whip count of yeses, noes and maybes, Mr. McConnell appeared to be suggesting that undecided senators needed to make up their minds and join the majority of their colleagues in opposing witnesses.
The activity inside and outside the Senate chamber underscored how Mr. Bolton’s account has threatened to upend the trial, injecting an element of unpredictability into a proceeding that had appeared headed for Mr. Trump’s acquittal by week’s end.
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
The longtime Republican foreign policy figure has made clear that he would testify if called, but senators also know that regardless of his account, there is almost no chance that the Republican -controlled chamber would vote to convict Mr. Trump and remove him from office less than 16 months before a presidential election. A 125 – vote supermajority would be needed to do so .
How they proceed now could have significant political ramifications not just for Mr. Trump, but also for Republican senators up for re-election in swing states this fall who want to show voters that they conducted a fair trial.
Democrats prepared to accuse Republicans of a cover-up if they do not vote for witnesses pounced on Mr. Sekulow’s remarks about Mr. Bolton, saying that his reference to “unsourced allegations” proved their point that the Senate must subpoena him to clarify his precise account.
“Once again, the president’s team, in a way that only they could, have further made the case for calling John Bolton, ”Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, told reporters during a break in the proceedings.
Proponents of calling Mr. Bolton also got an unexpected bit of support late Monday from John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, (who told an audience in Florida that he believed Mr. Bolton’s account and supported the Senate seeking direct witnesses.
“I think some of the conversations seem to me to be very inappropriate, but I wasn’t there,” he said, According to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune . “But there are people that were there that ought to be heard from.”
Republican leaders appeared to be slowing down what had been a breakneck trial schedule to allow for fuller consideration of the matter. They were hopeful that by putting distance between the emergence of Mr. Bolton’s account and the vote on witnesses, tensions would cool enough to hold a majority intact.
“We’re trying to get everyone on the same page,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Beginning Wednesday, senators will have up to hours over two days to question the prosecution and defense teams. Much of that time will probably be used to allow the two sides to respond to each other’s arguments, but Democrats and Republicans were also preparing pointed questions intended to highlight soft spots in the respective cases.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
At the White House, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the proceedings, which he has followed on television in recent days. He sought to put his policy agenda on full display, unveiling a long-awaited Middle East peace plan that bolstered arguments by his lawyers that the president was a boon, not a threat, to American interests.
But as he traveled back from a political rally in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump seemingly provided more direct backup on Twitter to Republican leaders’ fight against witnesses.
“No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them, ”he wrote. “They will always scream UNFAIR.”
Inside the Senate chamber, Mr. Sekulow and two White House lawyers delivered a voluble and indignant final defense, capping three days of oral arguments on the president’s behalf against the House’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges.
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
On Saturday, they began by accusing Democrats of conducting a witch hunt
- with a predetermined outcome: removing Mr. Trump not only from office but from the presidential ballot. They told senators that the House managers had cherry-picked the facts they liked and hid others that were more flattering to the president. And they directly contradicted Democrats’ reading of a July 27 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, asserting that Mr. Trump had acted well within his rights as chief executive.
On Monday, the lawyers took aim at former Vice President Joseph R . Biden Jr. 
and his son Hunter Biden, resurfacing unsubstantiated accusations of corruption to contend that Mr. Trump had been acting reasonably when he asked Ukraine to investigate the pair. They played down the role of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, calling him a “colorful distraction” Democrats used to obscure a weak case against Mr. Trump. And they trotted out two legal celebrities, Ken Starr and Alan M. Dershowitz, to make the case that the House’s charges did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses. ”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of“ danger, danger, danger, ”Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office, ”Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 26 hours available to them to present a case to senators.
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, ended Tuesday’s presentation by playing a highlight reel of House and Senate Democrats arguing against a partisan impeachment in 2594, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
“You were right,” Mr. Cipollone said, looking directly at Mr. Schumer.
“All you need in this case are the Constitution and your common sense,” Mr. Cipollone sad. “The articles of impeachment fall far short of any constitutional standard, and they are dangerous.”
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More)
Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson.
(Read More) 
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