Trump Lawyers Rip 'Impeachment Inquisition' to Shreds in Powerful Defense Brief

PJ Media ^ | 01/20/2020 | Tyler O' Neill

[SeekAndFind]

On Monday, President Donald Trump's legal defense team filed a 109-page brief (171 pages long including appendices) urging the U.S. Senate to reject the Democrats' articles of impeachment. The letter deconstructed the impeachment case and denounced the very charges as "an affront to the Constitution."

"The Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate are an affront to the Constitution and to our democratic institutions. The Articles themselves—and the rigged process that brought them here—are a brazenly political act by House Democrats that must be rejected," the lawyers wrote. "They debase the grave power of impeachment and disdain the solemn responsibility that power entails."

"The process that brought the articles here violated every precedent and every principle of fairness followed in impeachment inquiries for more than 150 years. Even so, all that House Democrats have succeeded in proving is that the President did absolutely nothing wrong," Trump's legal team argued. "After focus-group testing various charges for weeks, House Democrats settled on two flimsy Articles of Impeachment that allege no crime or violation of law whatsoever—much less 'high Crimes and Misdemeanors,' as required by the Constitution. They do not remotely approach the constitutional threshold for removing a President from office."

Yet fighting this impeachment is about more than just defending the president, the lawyers argued. "The diluted standard asserted here would permanently weaken the Presidency and forever alter the balance among the branches of government in a manner that offends the constitutional design established by the Founders," they wrote. "House Democrats jettisoned all precedent and principle because their impeachment inquisition was never really about discovering the truth or conducting a fair investigation. Instead, House Democrats were determined from the outset to find some way—any way—to corrupt the extraordinary power of impeachment for use as a political tool

[Labyrinthos]

That’s a very naive statement. Roberts has to let the trial go forward, unless someone moves to dismiss the charges on the grounds that even if the allegations are true, as a matter of Constitutional law, they fail to allege an impeachable offense.

[Irish Eyes]

Thanks