This Saturday morning, President Donald Trump’s defense team took the stand in his Senate impeachment trial to offer their rebuttal to the previous three days of arguments from House impeachment case managers. They nearly immediately launched into belligerent tirades against Democrats, who White House counsel Pat Cipollone completely baselessly accused of themselves trying to meddle in the results of the 2020 presidential election with the impeachment. The desperation inherent in that argument nicely exemplifies how solidly the facts are stacked against the president’s defenders.
Addressing Senators directly and referencing the House impeachment case managers who came before him, Cipollone railed:
‘They’re asking you not only to overturn the results of the last election, but, as I’ve said before, they’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot in an election that’s occurring in approximately nine months. I don’t think they spent one minute of their 24 hours talking to you about the consequences of that for our country.’
What about the consequences of Trump’s scheme to bribe Ukraine into investigating his domestic political opponents, the revelation of which is driving these impeachment proceedings? Cipollone conveniently completely skips over the possible terrible ramifications for the safety of the American electoral system if Trump had been allowed to operate freely enough to see his Ukraine bribery plot through to completion.
The facts of the situation are simple and straightforward. Trump and a team of his associates tried to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens on the basis of completely unfounded corruption allegations. While that unfolded, the president abruptly delayed military aid that Congress had designated for Ukraine, and he and his associates also dangled the possibility of a summit in D.C. with the White House for Ukrainian authorities. That is what happened — but that’s not about to wind down the passion from the president’s defense team, which even includes Alan Dershowitz, whose past clients include O.J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein.
As if he’s completely detached himself from these tangible realities, Cipollone pompously claimed, again referring to Democratic impeachment case managers:
‘We don’t believe that they have come anywhere close to meeting their burden for what they’re asking you to do.In fact, we believe that when you hear the facts… you will find that the president did absolutely nothing wrong.’
Cipollone and the rest of Trump’s defense team are slated to continue their arguments on Monday. In total, they have 24 hours to make their arguments, although it’s unclear if they will actually use the entirety of that allotted time frame — as of now, they’ve apparently got 22 hours left. Besides the above, the president’s team also walked through familiar pro-Trump talking points, like the claim that testimony on which Democrats have relied is largely secondhand and that they’ve stepped out of bounds via their overall handling of the investigation — another process argument, ignoring the facts.
There’s no real indication that there will be any significant defection of Republicans, considering how ardently that they have publicly stuck with the president so far, no matter the evidence.
