Democratic House prosecutors launched their final arguments Friday at U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, arguing the president will persist in abusing the power of his office ahead of the 2020 election unless Congress intervenes to remove him.
“He is who he is,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, told senators, accusing Trump of jeopardizing the U.S-Ukraine relationship in a way that benefited Russia just so he could take a political “cheap shot” at political foe Joe Biden.
“You cannot leave a man like that in office,” Schiff said. “You know it’s not going to stop. It’s not going to stop unless the Congress does something about it.”
Schiff also accused Trump — along with his attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — of working to “overturn a decades-long commitment to standing up to Russian aggression.”
“We’re undermining the rule of law, we’re undermining the principle ‘you don’t invade your neighbour,’ we’re undermining the key to our own success and for what? For help with a political campaign,” Schiff said.
Watch: Schiff says if the U.S. can’t be trusted, it could soon find itself without allies.
As Democrats pressed their case before skeptical Republican senators for a third day, the president’s legal team was preparing its defence, expected to start Saturday. Trump, with his eyes on the audience beyond the Senate chamber, bemoaned the schedule in a tweet.
After having been treated unbelievably unfairly in the House, and then having to endure hour after hour of lies, fraud & deception by Shifty Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer & their crew, looks like my lawyers will be forced to start on Saturday, which is called Death Valley in T.V.
—@realDonaldTrump
The Senate jurors faced another long day Friday armed with pens and paper — and, for Republicans, the gift of fidget spinners — for the historic trial.
The president is being tried in the Senate after the House impeached him last month. He is accused of abusing his office by asking Ukraine for politically motivated probes of Biden and his son while withholding military aid from the country, a U.S. ally that was at war with bordering Russia. The second article of impeachment accuses him of obstructing Congress by refusing to turn over documents or allow officials to testify in the House probe.
Republicans have defended Trump’s actions as appropriate and are casting the process as a politically motivated effort to weaken him in his re-election campaign. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and acquittal is considered likely.
The Senate is heading next week toward a pivotal vote on Democratic demands for testimony from top Trump aides, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, who refused to appear before the House. It would take four Republican senators to join the Democratic minority to seek witnesses, and so far the numbers appear lacking.
“This needs to end,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump confidant. He said he doesn’t want to hear from Bolton or the Bidens.
Invoking late Sen. John McCain
With Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, Friday’s arguments opened with Democrats wrapping up their presentation on the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, before turning to the second, obstruction of Congress.
The Democrats relied on the words of the late Republican senator John McCain to explain to senators why Trump’s decision to block the military aid to Ukraine was so “disturbing,” as Schiff put it.
It wasn’t just a policy dispute, Schiff argued, but “one hell of a Russian intelligence coup” as Trump chased “kooky” theories about Ukraine pushed by Giuliani that benefited Vladimir Putin at U.S. expense.
“This is Trump first. Not America first,” Schiff declared.
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, a former army ranger, said the only reason Trump eventually released his hold on the aid Ukraine desperately relied on to counter Russian aggression was because he had “gotten caught.”
“The scheme was unravelling,” said Crow. The money for Ukraine was put on hold prior to Trump’s July 25 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that helped launch the impeachment probe, and released Sept. 11 once Congress intervened.
Watch: Rep. Jason Crow compares Trump’s dealings with Ukraine to extortion.
Democrats argued that Trump’s abuse was for his own personal political benefit ahead of the 2020 election, even as the nation’s top FBI and national security officials were publicly warning off the theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election.
“That’s what Donald Trump wanted investigated or announced — this completely bogus Kremlin-pushed conspiracy theory,” Schiff said.
The Democrats’ challenge is clear as they try to convince not just fidgety senators but an American public divided over the Republican president in an election year.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed the public slightly more likely to say the Senate should convict and remove Trump from office than to say it should not, 45 per cent to 40 per cent. But a sizable percentage, 14 per cent, said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.
One issue with wide agreement: Trump should allow top aides to appear as witnesses at the trial. About seven in 10 respondents said so, including majorities of Republicans and Democrats, according to the poll.
After both sides have concluded their arguments next week, senators will face the question of whether to call witnesses to testify. But that issue has seemed all but settled. Republicans rejected Democratic efforts to get Trump aides, including Bolton and Mulvaney, to testify in back-to-back votes earlier this week.
As for the Ukraine connections, evidence has shown that Trump, with Giuliani, pursued investigations of Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on a Ukrainian gas company’s board, and sought the probe of the debunked theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
It’s a story line many in the president’s camp are still pushing. Giuliani, in an appearance Friday on Fox & Friends, insisted he would present evidence on his new podcast of “collusion going on in Ukraine to fix the 2016 election in favour of Hillary [Clinton].”
‘Not much new here’
Democrats, in their Senate prosecution, seemed to be anticipating arguments expected from the president’s defenders.
At one point, they showed video of a younger Graham, then a South Carolina congressman and now a Republican senator allied with Trump, arguing during Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment that no crime was needed for impeaching a president. Trump’s defence team is now arguing that the impeachment articles against him are invalid because they do not allege he committed a specific crime.
During their presentations, Democrats have been summarizing much of the evidence and testimony already presented during televised House impeachment hearings.
Republican Sen. Roy Blunt said the Democrats were putting forward “admirable presentations.” But he said, “There’s just not much new here.”
Another Republican senator, John Barrasso, said it seemed like “Groundhog Day in the Senate.”
The impeachment trial is set against the backdrop of the 2020 election. Four senators who are Democratic presidential candidates are off the campaign trail, seated as jurors.