WASHINGTON — Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee anticipates President Donald Trump’s legal team will “pull no punches” defending the president when the impeachment trial resumes this week before the U.S. Senate and millions of television viewers.
“They will be unapologetic and aggressive in not only arguing this entire proceeding up to now has been really unfair, but that the merits of the case against the president are not compelling and can’t hold up,” Lee said in an interview.
The second-term senator noted he can’t speak for the defense team, but he has conferred with them over strategy since House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry against Trump more than three months ago. Lee has reportedly encouraged White House counsel to confront abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges head-on in trial rather than push for a dismissal.
“I anticipate they will pull no punches in getting right to the heart of the matter,” he said Friday.
He didn’t have to wait until the president’s team argues on the Senate floor to find out. In Trump’s first formal response to articles of impeachment delivered to the Senate last week, his attorneys on Saturday attacked the House Democrats’ case as “a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn” the 2016 election and interfere in this year’s contest.
“The highly partisan and reckless obsession with impeaching the President began the day he was inaugurated and continues to this day,” his attorneys wrote in response to the summons to appear before the Senate tribunal.
House impeachment managers also filed their first brief outlining their arguments and didn’t hold back in their accusations concerning the president’s actions they deemed worthy of impeachment. “President Trump’s conduct is the Framers’ worst nightmare,” and poses a threat to national security and fair elections.
Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats in the House debates, social media and television of undertaking impeachment to get rid of a president they can’t beat in November.
But Saturday’s fiery filings and the hiring of a pair of legal heavy hitters give the first glimpses of how the president’s defense team will defend the president in what will be just the third Senate impeachment trial in American history.
Trump’s attorneys will be filing additional pleadings detailing their cases on Monday and shortly before the trial reconvenes Tuesday.
Made for TV
After the White House announced the addition of high-profile attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr to Trump’s defense team, observers weighed the pros and cons of enlisting the well-known and controversial attorneys to help argue Trump’s case before 100 senators and millions of viewers expected to tune into the rare event.
The defense team assembled by Trump will be headed by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow. Also assisting will be Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as independent counsel investigating Clinton; Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general; Jane Raskin, who helped defend Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; Eric Herschmann, another longtime personal attorney for Trump, and White House lawyers Patrick Philbin and Mike Purpura.
Politico cited conservative news tracker Media Matters in reporting the new impeachment defense team has made more than 350 appearances on Fox News in the past year.
“Trump has hired names he knows from the headlines. That’s his comfort level. His familiar universe, if you will,” Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor told Politico.
While some of the attorneys have won over Trump by defending him on television news panels, others also come with baggage that may or may not distract from defending the president in the actual trial.
“When Mr. Starr takes his place at the defense table on the Senate floor, his presence will almost guarantee that the battle over Mr. Trump’s impeachment in some ways will effectively replay the battle over Mr. Clinton’s,” wrote Peter Baker of The New York Times. “And every word Mr. Starr uttered and every position he took back then will be subject to new scrutiny by Mr. Trump’s adversaries, who will try to use them against the current presidential defendant.”
Outside of their presidential impeachment expertise, Starr and Dershowitz were part of convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein’s legal team in the mid-2000s, when the wealthy financier was under investigation of child prostitution. The association of Epstein, who killed himself while in custody, prompted White House lawyers to advise the president against tapping Dershowitz, the Associated Press reported.
But Dershowitz, a former Harvard law professor and constitutional law expert who also advised the defense team in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, downplayed his role in the impeachment trial as a limited assignment “to defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent.”
“The president asked me to present my independent constitutional arguments in my books and my articles to the Senate,” he told the Washington Post. “My argument is going to be directed at the constitutional criteria and why they haven’t been met in this case.”
He did just that Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” saying the president’s conduct was not criminal, therefore, not impeachable. But he dodged persistent questioning by host George Stephanopoulos on whether Trump enlisted foreign interference in the 2020 election in his dealings with Ukraine and if that’s OK.
“As a lawyer in the case, I’m not going to present my personal views on what I think,” Dershowitz said, noting he’s a “liberal Democrat” who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
‘Delicate balance’
While the president’s team has added some made-for-TV star power, Lee expects both groups of lawyers will play to the public and political audiences when they appear on the floor of the Senate.
“And they understand that (members of) the Senate are accountable to those viewers,” he said.
Confident his Republican majority will pronounce the president not guilty, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would like to avoid the partisan brawls that erupted when the House passed articles of impeachment against Trump last month and voted to send them to the Senate last week.
And political showboating won’t play well with viewers, either, Lee said.
“A judge or a jury can be turned off if somebody provides too much or too little emotion,” he said. “It’s a delicate balance.”
The White House is trying to find that sweet spot in its first pleadings filed over the holiday weekend, according to The Associated Press.
“Those inside the administration have echoed warnings from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that the pleadings must be sensitive to the Senate’s more staid traditions and leave the sharper rhetoric to Twitter and cable news,” AP reported.
For Lee the defense is straight forward.
He thinks the obstruction of Congress article is the weakest, calling it “a made up thing” that didn’t happen because House investigators never exhausted their rights by going to court.
Trump is also accused of abusing his power by pressuring Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Trump’s political rivals, using as leverage security aid and a White House meeting.
“That one is based ultimately on a phone call, the transcript of which does not reveal that the president did anything wrong,” Lee said.
Saturday’s brief filing by Trump’s defense team made the same arguments, then used the terms “abused” and “obstruct” in describing the process House Democrats employed to impeaching Trump.
“By approving the Articles, the House violated our constitutional order, illegally abused its power of impeachment, and attempted to obstruct President Trump’s ability to faithfully execute the duties of his Office,” Cipollone and Sekulow wrote.
House investigators have released more information the past week seeking to bolster their claims that the July 25 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was central to a larger campaign to get a foreign country to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
The document release followed Thursday’s announcement by the Government Accountability Office that the White House violated federal law by withholding congressionally approved security aid to Ukraine, which shares a border with a hostile Russia.
In response, the White House disagreed and said it does not have to follow decisions by the accountability office because it is an arm of Congress. White House officials also have noted that Trump sent the $391 million in aid to Ukraine before the Sept. 30 deadline.