Watch a live stream of Tuesday’s impeachment proceedings, as Donald Trump’s lawyers wrap up their opening arguments.
On Tuesday, in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the President’s legal team will complete its defense. The day before, Trump’s lawyers focussed largely on constitutional, legal, and historical precedents; in Monday’s first speech, Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose salacious report led the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, asserted that the proceedings against Trump have been “dripping with fundamental process violations.” Later in the afternoon, the President’s deputy counsel Pat Philbin argued that the Democrats have conflated executive privilege with abuse of power and that the President was denied due process. He repeated the common Republican talking point that Trump was unable to be represented by counsel or to call witnesses during the House inquiry, saying that the President had been shut out of the proceedings “for seventy-one out of seventy-eight days.” He also chalked up the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans toward the impeachment as “friction” between the executive and legislative branches, which the Constitution both predicted and allows.
It was Pam Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida, who presented a new pillar of Trump’s defense: a long-anticipated attack on Joe and Hunter Biden. “We would prefer not to be discussing this,” she said, adding that it was only because the House managers mentioned Biden or Burisma “over four hundred times” during their arguments last week—a number she cited repeatedly—that Trump’s defense team was forced to address the subject. Bondi sought to portray Hunter Biden as a profiteer who was nepotistically installed in a lucrative position on Burisma’s board. In lieu of concrete evidence of the Bidens’ alleged corruption, she offered excerpts from both the televised House testimony of George Kent and from pieces published in the Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets expressing concern that Hunter Biden’s board position represented a potential conflict of interest. (She also routinely quoted from news outlets throughout her arguments, including from The New Yorker.) Later, Eric Herschmann, a partner at the private law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, questioned Joe Biden’s temperament, saying that “everyone who works for him has been screamed at.” Their aim was to establish that Trump’s desire for an investigation of the Bidens was warranted—no matter what length the President seemed willing to go for it.
Herschmann’s comments then veered further off course. He brought up an episode in March, 2012, in which Barack Obama told Dmitri Medvedev, who was then the Russian President, that he understood Russia’s concerns regarding an anti-missile shield that the U.S. and NATO wanted to build across Europe. Obama said, unknowingly into a hot mike, that he’d have “more flexibility” to accommodate concessions to Russia following the 2012 Presidential election in the U.S. Herschmann argued that this conversation constituted a more impeachable offense than Trump’s actions in the Ukraine affair. He went on to praise President Trump as if he were campaigning for his reëlection, saying that perhaps the American people like “historically low unemployment,” strong 401(k)s, “secure borders,” favorable trade agreements, “lower taxes,” and “a President who kept his promises and delivered on them.”
Alan Dershowitz, who closed the day’s arguments with a coda centered on history and constitutional law, opened his remarks with personal sentiments: he said that he abhorred Nixon and supported his impeachment; admired Clinton and opposed his impeachment; and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and would defend her as he’s defending Trump were she the President and presented with the same articles of impeachment. Those articles, he argued, are ultimately too vague and subjective to warrant Trump’s removal, and he asserted that he now believes, in contrast to the past, that impeachment charges must be criminal in nature. He also addressed more directly than his colleagues the “Bolton Bombshell”—a leak, late on Sunday, of a draft of a forthcoming book by the former national-security adviser John Bolton, which says that Trump told Bolton directly that the release of the withheld aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into certain Democrats. (In her most recent column, the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser called Bolton’s revelation “the proverbial smoking gun.”) “Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” Dershowitz said. But the news did change things for some. At a lunch for Republican senators on Monday, Patrick Toomey, of Pennsylvania, said that he now would be open to some sort of witness exchange involving Bolton. Democrats need only four Republican votes in order to call witnesses. Three—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney—have already expressed interest.
You can watch the proceedings on the live stream above, as the President’s lawyers wrap up their arguments.
