In the first official strike against the impeachment case, President Donald Trump’s lawyers filed a reply brief on Saturday, accusing House Democrats of presenting a fatally flawed argument that is as vapid as it is “constitutionally invalid.” In stark terms, the president’s legal team accused Democrats of planning Trump’s impeachment from the moment he took office, suggesting that the Ukraine “scandal” was little more than a pretense meant to justify putting a stake in the heart of the voters’ will.
“This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election — now just months away,” Trump’s lawyers argued. “The highly partisan and reckless obsession with impeaching the president began the day he was inaugurated and continues to this day.”
Trump’s legal team said that the impeachment case is not only undermined by the lack of evidence – indeed, the lack of any named crime at all – but also the “procedural irregularities” through which the House arrived at an impeachment vote.
“In order to preserve our constitutional structure of government, to reject the poisonous partisanship that the Framers warned against, to ensure one-party political impeachment vendettas do not become the ‘new normal,’ and to vindicate the will of the American people, the Senate must reject both Articles of Impeachment,” Trump’s legal team wrote. “In the end, this entire process is nothing more than a dangerous attack on the American people themselves and their fundamental right to vote.”
For their part, House Democrats have made much ado about the so-called “new evidence” that has emerged since last month. This includes a new report from the Government Accountability Office that concludes that President Trump and the Office of Management and Budget violated federal law by withholding Ukrainian military aid.
But this is the kind of additional evidence that actually weakens the case against Trump. It’s like putting a guy on trial for murder and then presenting evidence from Americans Against Murder to assure the jury that murder is, like, really serious, y’all.
The problem is that no president has ever taken the squawking of the GAO seriously, and it is inane to present their findings as having bolstered the case for Trump’s removal. The previous president was also found by the GAO to have violated the law. But when that report was issued, condemning Obama’s Bowe Bergdahl trade with the Taliban, the Washington Post said that it was destined to become little more “than a political talking point.”
Democrats are swimming against a powerful tide, trying desperately to make gold out of straw. In doing so, they are not only undermining the Constitution, they are actively doing the bidding of Moscow and Tehran.
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