For a second there, it looked like former President Donald Trump would be stuck with Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell as his legal team. But just in the nick of time, he managed to find attorneys to file his response to the House of Representatives’s article of impeachment against him.
Despite his reported desire to justify his actions by claiming that the election was stolen, Trump’s new team dialed down the crazy to a defense that is more weak than it is wacky.
The crux of Trump’s case rests on the notion that convicting a president no longer in office is unconstitutional. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, already put the Senate on the record with a vote on this question, and 45 senators agreed. Still, the substance of his defense is almost nonexistent.
“It is admitted that after the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of COVID-19 pandemic ‘safeguards’ states election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures,” the response reads. “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.”
That latter statement is obviously incorrect. And more importantly, the Senate can establish whether Trump knew if his election claims were false as he was saying them if it calls the right witnesses. Not only do they have a myriad of Trump’s minions to ask about his post-election private remarks about the election, but if Axios’s reporting is correct, then Trump had premeditated the election theft excuse in October in case he did indeed lose.
And once again, Trump claims he had a perfect phone call.
“It is denied that President Trump acted improperly in that telephone call in any way,” the brief says of Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Trump has four saving graces. The first is the GOP’s willingness to go along with the procedural defense of Trump. Their argument is also aided by Chief Justice John Roberts’s unwillingness to preside over the trial, further (the argument goes) casting doubt over its validity. Furthermore, there’s the fact that Democrats already erred in not specifically addressing Trump’s dereliction of duty during the attack on the Capitol in failing to authorize the National Guard, forcing Mike Pence to do so. A final gift to Trump would be for the senators to speed through a trial as they did with his first impeachment.
Trump’s case isn’t strong on the merits, but the political reality of partisan gridlock means Democrats must subpoena every witness possible if they want a chance of achieving even a simple majority vote for conviction.
