Day seven of the trial on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020.
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The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump began on Tuesday, Jan. 21, after a weekslong impasse over how the Senate trial would proceed, and debate over the rules stretched nearly 13 hours.
Reporting on day seven of the trial from The Hill:
President Trump’s impeachment trial completes its first full week on Tuesday with closing arguments from the president’s lawyers.
The president’s legal team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow, spent roughly eight hours Monday seeking to pick apart House Democrats’ case as flawed, incomplete and politically-motivated.
They also went on the attack against the Bidens in a bid to argue that Trump had legitimate reason to raise the family on the call with Ukraine’s president at the center of the impeachment case.
Monday’s proceedings featured arguments from a number of figures on the president’s legal team who had not previously spoken on the Senate floor, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who wrapped up the proceedings by arguing that House Democrats’ case did not meet the constitutional criteria for impeachment because they did not allege “criminal-like conduct.”
The attorneys waited until the very end of the day to explicitly address the elephant in the room — namely an explosive New York Times report that said Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton writes in a draft of his memoir that Trump told him he wanted to continue to withhold security assistance to Ukraine until the country helped with investigations into Democrats.
“Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” Dershowitz said late Monday evening after the rest of the legal team danced around the issue.
