Members of the Trump defense team saw their two-hour presentation Saturday as a preview of coming attractions — a way to give senators a sense of the president’s defense while also suggesting there is much more to come when the impeachment trial resumes Monday. They were also acutely aware that, after 23 hours of the Democratic case against the president made over the course of three days, many senators were just tired. Even if the first day of presentation had not come on a low-rating Saturday, Republicans would have stayed away from forcing senators into another late night.
Lawmakers were “relieved after such a long week,” one GOP source said Saturday afternoon — relieved both to get a break and to see the Trump team at the podium offering a vigorous defense after three days of listening to the Democratic House impeachment managers make the case for removing President Trump.
And what relieved many GOP lawmakers was that the Trump defenders immediately dove into the facts of the Trump-Ukraine matter. Yes, some have strong objections about the process the House followed in impeaching the president. Indeed, some Democrats had charged that was all Trump defenders had to argue. But the opening of Saturday’s argument was about the substance of the case.
“Today’s approach was to address head-on the facts that [Democratic impeachment managers] presented by presenting a more fulsome view of those facts, a more in-depth view, because they were very much cherry-picked,” said a member of Trump’s defense team in a phone conversation Saturday.
White House counsel Pat Cipollone began by noting that even though the Democratic managers took 23 hours to present their case, they still left things out. The Trump defense would give senators those left-out facts. “And every time you see one of those pieces of evidence, ask yourself, ‘Why didn’t I see that in the first three days?'” Cipollone told senators. “They had it. It came out of their process. Why didn’t they show that to the Senate?”
Cipollone handed off the presentation to deputy White House counsel Michael Purpura, who went through a list of facts the defenders view as important but that the House managers omitted. What about the officials who listened to the July 25, 2019, Trump-Ukraine call and did not hear a problem? What about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that he did not feel pressured? What about the testimony of four witnesses who said the Ukrainians did not know about the pause in security assistance at the time of the call?
“The House managers didn’t show you this testimony from any of these four witnesses,” Purpura said. “Why not?” Time and again, Purpura pointed to facts that tended to support the president and asked: Why didn’t they tell you this?
In the bigger picture, the Trump team highlighted what Purpura called “six facts that have not and will not change:”
1) The call transcript “shows that the president did not condition either security assistance or a meeting on anything.”
2) Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials “have repeatedly said that there was no quid pro quo and no pressure on them to review anything.”
3) Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials “did not even know the security assistance was paused” at the time of the call.
4) No witness testified that Trump himself said “that there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a presidential meeting, or anything else.”
5) U.S. security assistance was restarted on Sept. 11, 2019, and Trump met Zelensky on Sept. 25 “without the Ukrainian government announcing any investigation.”
6) Trump “has been a better friend and stronger supporter of Ukraine than his predecessor.”
Later, the defense team turned to the question of process. Patrick Philbin, another deputy White House counsel, walked the Senate through the White House’s position that the House subpoenas issued before the House voted to begin an impeachment investigation were not valid. Philbin pointed out that House Democrats banned the presence of agency lawyers or White House representatives for all of the depositions that formed the heart of the impeachment effort. Only at the end of the House’s 78-day impeachment investigation, when the main work was done, were presidential lawyers invited to attend a couple of meaningless hearings.
“The president was completely locked out,” Philbin told the Senate. “He couldn’t be represented by counsel, he couldn’t examine witnesses, he couldn’t present evidence, he couldn’t present witnesses — for 71 of the 78 days. That’s not due process.”
The mixture of substance and process was a sign White House lawyers knew that, even among Republicans, they were addressing a varied audience. Some GOP senators wished the White House had made a more substantive defense over the last few months. Some were angry at the House Democrats’ procedural shortcuts. Some were worried about the tone of the impeachment battle.
On Saturday, the Trump defense team seemed to find the right balance. “The tone was right, the demeanor was right, the delivery was right,” said one Republican senator. “They deconstructed the Democrats’ arguments in a respectful way, very appropriate for the Senate chamber. It wasn’t like Jerry Nadler standing there calling all of us liars.”
Of those Republicans who were uneasy about the president’s defense and leaning toward agreeing with Democratic demands to call new witnesses, the senator said, “I think it settled their nerves.”
“I thought it was a pretty effective factual rebuttal, not rhetorically overheated or ad hominem,” said another GOP senator. “After Democrats asserted for days that they wouldn’t argue the facts, they did a pretty good job of doing just that.”
“Today was the first day the facts have actually been allowed to be cross-examined,” Republican Sen. James Lankford told reporters.
“Every member of the defense team, and the president, were very pleased with today,” said one House member after the Senate session. “In two concise hours, we eviscerated the managers’ weak case and [lead impeachment manager Adam] Schiff’s credibility. We thought it was most strategic to set the framework today rather than hold the Senate in a lengthy Saturday session after the previous painful three days. There will be plenty of substance and heavy artillery to come.”
Since the defense began on a weekend, Monday will be almost a restart for the Trump team. The audience will be new and bigger. The Trump presentation will feature big names, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz, making constitutional arguments. But probably more importantly, it will continue the direct engagement of the Democratic case, both in the facts and the way House Democrats pursued it. For three straight days, Democrats had the stage to themselves. Now the president’s team is able to tell its side of the story.
