In a lengthy response filed on Monday, President Donald Trump’s legal team rejected the articles of impeachment charging Trump with abuse of power obstruction of Congress, decrying the attempt to remove him as a “charade” and calling on senators to quickly reject it.
In their 110-page rebuttal of Democrats’ accusations against Trump, the lawyers argue the impeachment was a partisan sham that failed to prove any violation of law. They warn against dangerous precedents should Democrats’ efforts prove successful. And they insist Trump was well within his prerogatives to raise the issue of his political rivals with a foreign leader.
“The Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate are an affront to the Constitution and to our democratic institutions,” the President’s lawyers wrote in opening sentences of the document. “The Articles themselves — and the rigged process that brought them here — are a brazenly political act by House Democrats that must be rejected. They debase the grave power of impeachment and disdain the solemn responsibility that power entails.”
The legal brief attempts to dismantle both charges against the President that were formalized in the House of Representatives late last year.
The first charge– that Trump committed “abuse of power” in his attempts to surface political dirt by withholding military aid to Ukraine — is a “made up theory,” the President’s legal team argues.
“Under the Constitution, impeachable offenses must be defined under established law. And they must be based on objective wrongdoing, not supposed subjective motives dreamt up by a hostile faction in the House and superimposed onto a President’s entirely lawful conduct,” the document reads.
The second charge — that Trump obstructed congressional investigators during the impeachment proceedings — is “frivolous and dangerous” and represents an attempt to alter the separation of powers outlined by the Constitution, the lawyers argue.
You can read the entire motion here.
