Jan. 28 (UPI) — Attorneys defending President Donald Trump against two impeachment charges will conclude their opening arguments Tuesday and the trial could move on to the questioning phase by day’s end.
White House attorneys will begin their third and final allotted day at 1 p.m. EST, but the president’s team has already said it won’t need the full day.
Led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and attorney Jay Sekulow, the defense team has said it wants to make its case “quickly” and “efficiently,” and criticized Democratic managers for taking all of its allotted time last week.
Trump is charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for his dealings with Ukraine last year. The charges say the president used Congress-approved military aid and a potential White House visit as leverage to pressure Kiev into announcing investigations of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, a former board member for Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
The second article says Trump interfered with the House impeachment investigation by refusing to cooperate and defying subpoenas to keep administration officials from testifying in the inquiry.
Trump’s legal team on Monday sought to discredit the Democrats’ case by arguing the president never made Ukraine’s military aid conditional on investigating the Bidens.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued that the charges against Trump due not meet the criteria of “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment by the U.S. Constitution.
Senate Republicans have rebuffed Democrats’ calls to include witnesses and introduce new evidence at the Senate trial, but a report Monday detailing the contents of a new book by former national security adviser John Bolton has the potential to change their minds.
The New York Times report said in the book Bolton establishes a clear connection between Trump’s withholding Ukrainian aid and efforts to investigate the Bidens. In the forthcoming book, the report said, Bolton acknowledges he was directly told by Trump the aid was to be withheld in exchange for Kiev’s promise to investigate the two men — a claim Trump denied on Twitter Monday.
At least two GOP senators, Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have said the report, if true, increases the likelihood Republicans in the chamber will also want to hear from witnesses. A vote to include witnesses and evidence is expected at the trial sometime after the questioning stage.
Monday, Trump’s defense team dismissed the impact of the New York Times report.
“Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” Dershowitz argued.
Under trial rules, the questioning phase starts immediately the following opening arguments. Senators will have 16 hours to question both Democratic managers and the president’s attorneys, a stage that’s expected to last about three days.
After questioning, the chamber will then address various potential motions — like the vote for witnesses or a move to dismiss the case. The White House, however, has already indicated it won’t seek to dismiss.
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