A day before the Senate impeachment trial kicks off, President Trump’s legal team urged the Senate to “swiftly and roundly condemn” the articles of impeachment that it characterized as “flimsy” in a brief filed to the Senate Monday.
The brief, which argues that Trump “absolutely nothing wrong” and that the impeachment case is “a dangerous perversion of the Constitution,” provided a rebuttal to the House Democrats’ 111-page trial brief filed to the Senate by impeachment managers Saturday evening, which urged the Senate to “eliminate the threat that the President poses to America’s national security” and summarized their argument for why the House charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Trump lawyers wrote in the 171-page filing Monday that the impeachment case is a “constitutional travesty” and argued that the two articles of impeachment brought against Trump — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — are not impeachable offenses.
Echoing its formal response to the Senate summons Saturday evening, Trump lawyers accused House Democrats again of using the impeachment case as a “political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 election and to interfere in the 2020 election.”
“Instead, House Democrats were determined from the outset to find some way — any way — to corrupt the extraordinary power of impeachment for use as a political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 election and to interfere in the 2020 election,” Trump’s legal team wrote in the brief. “All of that is a dangerous perversion of the Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn.”
Trump’s lawyers also defended the President’s request to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden in the brief, saying that it “would have been legitimate to mention the Biden-Burisma affair.”
Read the brief below:
