The lawyers of Donald Trump have extended the line of defense of the president while they try that the judgment finishes with a rapid acquittal. Throughout the process, the legal team of the White House has insisted that there is no incriminating evidence that the president used coercion to get Ukraine to investigate its political rivals, which benefited him electorally. On Wednesday, however, they justified that the possible quid pro quo It responded to “general interest,” an argument that evoked former President Richard Nixon. This Thursday was the second question time of the senators.
Trump openly asked his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodimir Zelenski, to open two investigations on the democrats, one about a discredited theory of electoral interference of 2016 and another about presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, for the latter’s business in the country while the father was vice president. The request of these inquiries is accredited in the telephone conversation that both leaders held on July 25 and that the US president has never denied.
What he has denied – and that embodies the charge of abuse of power he faces – is that he use as an exchange currency an invitation to the White House and, more seriously, the delivery of military aid of 391 million dollars to the country that had already been approved by the US Congress. The lawyers have argued so far that the freezing of these funds was not related to the investigations, that is, it was not used to coerce Kiev, and that the meeting between Trump and Zelenski ended up being held in New York at the end of September ( when the case had already exploded).
On Wednesday, answering one of the senators’ questions, lawyer Alan Dershowitz surprised with a new idea: that quid pro quo, even if it could be tested, it would not deserve a impeachment if Trump acted thinking about the “general interest.” “Any public office I know believes that his election is in the public interest and if the president does something that he believes can help him get re-elected, in the interest of the general interest, that may not be the kind of quid pro quo that ends in a impeachment”, Explained Dershowitz, professor emeritus of Harvard famous for defending characters like O. J. Simpson or the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The phrase evoked the reasoning that Richard Nixon, following the Watergate case, he did in 1977 to the famous interview with David Frost, when he ended up saying “Well, when the president does it, it means that it is not illegal.” Former Secretary of State and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reproached him on Twitter: “Richard Nixon once gave that argument,” he wrote on his Twitter account, “was forced to resign in a dishonorable manner. In America, nobody is above the law. ”
The lawyer tried to rectify this Thursday, ensuring that his words had been “misrepresented”. “They have presented my argument as if I said that if a president believes that his re-election is in the public interest, he can do what he wants, when I said nothing,” he protested.
The two sessions of question time of the senators, 16 hours that culminated yesterday, were marked by the revelations of the book that John Bolton, former National Security adviser, plans to publish in March. According to what has transpired, Bolton says in one of the passages that Trump told him that I planned to freeze military aid to Ukraine as long as he failed to investigate the Democrats. That is, it corroborates the accusation. The revelation has further stirred the political battle for the call or not of new witnesses to testify in the Senate, starting with Bolton. Before the House of Representatives declared 17 people, but none of the charges of the Administration claimed by the Democrats. That blockade, together with the rejection of the delivery of documents, supposed the charge of obstruction to Congress and postponed the battle for the Senate.
The doubt will be resolved very soon, in a vote that is expected for this Friday, and if the Republicans, with their majority in the House (53 of the 100 seats) manage to block the appearances, the third impeachment in the history of the United States it will rush to an end. Trump’s dismissal, the ultimate consequence of an exceptional procedure, is ruled out, as it would require the support of two-thirds of the Senate and Republicans have closed ranks around the president. The statements take place in the halls, before and after the trial days, or during breaks. Inside, he is the president of the Supreme, Judge John Roberts, who reads aloud the questions presented by senators. They write or read documents, and must remain silent. Trump, meanwhile, reinforces his rally agenda, with an eye on November 2020.
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