Salahuddin Haider
President Donald Trump has lined up a team of old guards to defend him in the impeachment proceedings for abuse of power for political gains as Senate seem all too ready to pick up from where the Congress or the House of Representatives has finished the case against him to add a new chapter to American history of sending back homes their powerful heads of State.
Information collected from New York Times, and several other sources reveal that charges against President Trump will be read out loud, and lawmakers will lay the procedural groundwork for the trial.
Noted lawyer Starr, whose investigation into President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships led to his impeachment, will be joined by Robert Ray, who succeeded Mr. Starr as independent counsel and wrote the final report on Mr. Clinton, the person said.
Rounding out the team will be Mr. Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor who became famous as a defense counsel for high-profile defendants like O.J. Simpson. This will be the third time in recent memory that US Presidents will face the humiliation. Richard Nixon was the first to be impeached, but pardoned later, and Bill Clinton narrowly escaped yet another disaster ater his wife Hillary defended him publicly, and the Mona Lovenski sex scandal ended rather abruptly.
In a six-page filing formally responding to the impeachment charges, President Trump’s lawyers rejected the case against him as illegitimate and described the effort to remove him as dangerous.
President Trump’s legal defense team strenuously denied on Saturday that he had committed impeachable acts, denouncing the charges against him as a “brazen and unlawful” attempt to cost him re-election as House Democrats laid out in meticulous detail their case that he should be removed from office.
In the first legal filings for the Senate impeachment trial that opens in earnest on Tuesday, the dueling arguments from the White House and the House impeachment managers previewed a politically charged fight over Mr. Trump’s fate, unfolding against the backdrop of the presidential election campaign, reported the New York Times.
They presented the legal strategies both sides are likely to employ during the third presidential impeachment trial in American history. They also vividly illustrated how the proceeding is almost certain to rekindle feuding over the 2016 election that has barely subsided during Mr. Trump’s tenure, and reverberate — whether he is convicted or acquitted — in an even more brutal electoral fight in November.
In a 46-page trial memorandum, and additional 60-page statement of facts, the House impeachment managers asserted that beginning in the spring, Mr. Trump undertook a corrupt campaign to enlist a foreign government to help him win the 2020 election. He did so, the Democrats argued, by pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations of his political rivals, withholding as leverage vital military aid and a White House meeting for the country’s president.
The report said that the president then sought to conceal those actions from Congress, they said, posing “a serious danger to our constitutional checks and balances” by ordering administration officials not to testify or turn over documents requested by a House impeachment inquiry.
“President Trump’s conduct is the framers’ worst nightmare,” wrote the seven Democratic managers, led by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California.
“The articles of impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” they said in the response, which was Mr. Trump’s first legal submission in the impeachment proceeding, ahead of a fuller brief that is due on Monday. “This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away.”
Strangely the president’s lawyers did not deny any of the core facts underlying Democrats’ charges, conceding what considerable evidence and testimony in the House has shown: that he withheld $391 million in aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine and asked the country’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden.But they said Mr. Trump broke no laws and was acting entirely appropriately and within his powers when he did so, echoing his repeated protestations of his own innocence. They argued that he was not seeking political advantage, but working to root out corruption in Ukraine.
“President Trump categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation in both articles of impeachment,” wrote Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.
The managers’ filing repeated many of the same arguments they laid out last fall in a report on the findings of their two-month impeachment inquiry. But it also indicated that they intended to make use of information that has come to light since the House’s impeachment vote in December.
They cited new documentary records handed over by Lev Parnas, an associate of the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, about the pressure campaign on Ukraine, and a Government Accountability Office report released this week that found that Mr. Trump violated the law when he withheld the military aid.
And though the House ultimately declined to bring charges based on the special counsel’s Russia investigation, Saturday’s filing indicates the managers are also poised to reprise its findings as they argue that Mr. Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine fits a pattern that poses a continuing threat to American elections. They argued that, just as Mr. Trump welcomed interference on his behalf from Russia in the 2016 election and then sought to thwart a federal investigation into the matter, he solicited Ukrainian assistance in the 2020 contest and then obstructed Congress’s ability to investigate.
