Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is dispensing legal advice to President Trump’s defense team in the Senate impeachment trial, suggesting they focus on the substance of Democrats’ impeachment case and on Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
House Democrats passed two articles of impeachment against the president last year for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“I told them, ‘Look, nothing matters more than the facts on Burisma.’ Yesterday, the House managers spent over an hour arguing there’s no reason to investigate Burisma,” Cruz said.
The Texas Republican sparred bitterly with Trump during the 2016 presidential primary. Trump went after Cruz’s wife, bashing her looks on Twitter.
Cruz had already left the race when Trump said Cruz’s father had ties to the man who killed John F. Kennedy, reprising a National Enquirer story that Rafael Cruz was photographed next to Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy was shot. “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting?” Trump said in a Fox News appearance. “It’s horrible.”
They have since mended fences, with Trump last year interviewing Heidi Cruz for a top job at the World Bank.
Cruz said the Democrats’ efforts to limit discussion regarding the Bidens created an opportunity for the president’s team.
“I also think the House managers made a serious tactical mistake,” Cruz said in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I think yesterday was very consequential, because what they’ve done is they’ve opened the door to Burisma,” he said. “They’ve opened the door to Hunter Biden testifying.” Hunter Biden, 49, sat on the board of Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019, earning $50,000 per month.
“It’s a jury trial in a sense of laying out the argument to the American people. But it also — there is an element in which it is a Supreme Court argument,” Cruz added, stressing the need to make a calm and deliberate case.
Cruz pitched an exchange of witnesses in the Senate chamber last week, suggesting the Republican leadership let former national security adviser John Bolton testify, something Democrats said they were interested in, and call witnesses of their own.
“I think calling the so-called whistleblower as a witness would be a perfectly reasonable step for the president’s defense team to take, and if the president wants to call the whistleblower, the Senate should allow him to do so,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner in a Jan. 17 interview.
This strategy for “witness reciprocity” could allow Republicans to call on Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, or the whistleblower, who reported Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that is at the center of the impeachment trial.
Cruz has been a staunch defender of the president, arguing in a televised interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in December that Trump’s Ukraine phone call was “perfectly within the authority of the president to investigate corruption.” Cruz also called for Hunter Biden’s testimony if the White House legal defense so wished.
“You can be sure we’re gonna allow the president to defend himself as well,” Cruz said. “That means, I believe, if the president wants to call witnesses, if the president wants to call Hunter Biden or wants to call the whistleblower, the Senate should allow [him] to do so.”
After details of the Ukraine call became public, Trump urged China to investigate the two Bidens.
Cruz disputed the president’s action, saying that U.S. elections should be determined by Americans. “Look, of course not,” Cruz said in an October 2019 interview with CBS’s Face the Nation. “Elections in the U.S. should be decided by Americans. It’s not the business of foreign countries, any foreign countries, to be interfering in our elections.”
