Both sides made their final arguments. Here's what they said.
Welcome back to the Impeachment Briefing. As the political world turns its attention to Iowa, the impeachment trial is meandering toward the finish line. |
- After more than four months of investigation and prosecution, House Democrats concluded their impeachment efforts this afternoon. Over four hours, which they split with President Trump’s legal team, the managers presented their case one final time, arguing that Mr. Trump had abused the power of his office and, if left unchecked, would do so again in the future.
- Senators now have a chance to speak in the Senate chamber for the first time during the trial, with 10 minutes allotted to each of them to speechify. Over a dozen did so on Monday after closing arguments wrapped up. On Wednesday afternoon, they will take their final votes on the two articles of impeachment.
- While Mr. Trump’s acquittal is a near certainty, there’s still some room for surprise: Moderate Democratic senators, some of whom are up for re-election, left the door open today to acquitting Mr. Trump. Doug Jones of Alabama and Joe Manchin of West Virginia both said they were still undecided, though Mr. Manchin said he believed there would be bipartisan support for a vote to censure the president.
|
How the two sides concluded their arguments |
Today we (most likely) saw the last of the House managers and White House lawyers who spent two weeks arguing their cases in front of the Senate. Over four hours, the two sides delivered emotional closing arguments, a kind of greatest hits compilation. Here’s how they used their final day in the public spotlight. |
- Representative Adam Schiff, the lead manager, framed his closing remarks with this question: Can you trust the president? “The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t,” he said. “You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change, and you know it.” Mr. Schiff said that “a man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”
- “Is there one among you who will say, ‘Enough’?” Mr. Schiff asked Republicans, who sat in front of him in silence. “Truth matters to you, and right matters to you,” he said. “You are decent. He is not who you are.”
- Representative Hakeem Jeffries, another manager, said that Mr. Trump staying in office could potentially undermine our elections. “Absent conviction and removal, how can we be assured that this president will not do it again?” he asked. “If we are to rely on the next election to judge the president’s efforts to cheat in that election, how can we know that the election will be free and fair?”
|
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S LAWYERS |
- Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, told senators to “leave it to the voters.” He framed impeachment as “an effort to overturn the results of one election and to try to interfere in the coming election that begins today in Iowa.”
- Patrick Philbin, a deputy counsel to the president, accused Democrats of “jumping straight to the ultimate nuclear weapon of the Constitution” in response to Mr. Trump’s efforts to block aides and documents from the House impeachment inquiry. To support the charge of obstruction, Mr. Philbin argued, would “fundamentally alter the balance between the different branches of government.”
- Michael Purpura, a deputy White House counsel, denied a quid pro quo, but tailored his argument narrowly in light of revelations from John Bolton’s book manuscript, which offered firsthand evidence of one. “The president did not condition security assistance or a meeting on anything in the July 25 call,” Mr. Purpura said today, ignoring testimony and other evidence describing a much longer pressure campaign.
|
What did House Democrats get from impeachment? |
Senate Republicans have spoken repeatedly during the trial — in interviews and through questions they asked to the House managers and White House lawyers — about the weak case they believe Democrats built against Mr. Trump. |
But Democrats don’t see it that way. They gathered over a hundred hours of testimony and reams of documents, published several long reports, and argued their case for months on television in front of millions of Americans. They view impeachment as a resounding accomplishment, a public record of wrongdoing that will last. |
“I think that we have pulled back a veil of behavior totally unacceptable to our founders, and that the public will see this with a clearer eye, an unblurred eye,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today, in an interview with one of my colleagues. “Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever. And now these senators, though they don’t have the courage to assign the appropriate penalty, at least are recognizing that he did something wrong.” |
I asked Julie Davis, our congressional editor, about whether Democrats could consider this impeachment a success. |
Julie, how did House Democrats conceive of this case from the beginning? |
Before last fall, they had all of this diffuse information about Mr. Trump that they found objectionable, or even potentially criminal — things that were generally inappropriate but might not reach the level of impeachable, in their minds. When the Ukraine revelations came to light, I think there was a feeling that it encapsulated the worst of what they believed the president was up to, that he had essentially been willing to cheat his way into power, then cheat on how he wielded it, and that he was now cheating to he keep it. |
They thought of this impeachment as something they were obligated to do. And they felt like if they were going to have an effective message against Mr. Trump and why he was not fit to be president, this was the best way to organize it. I think there was a feeling that there was merit in explaining to people how democracy works and how fragile it really can be. The case that I think ultimately persuaded them to go forward was: There are some things you can’t let that slide, and the integrity of an election is one of them. They wanted to present themselves as guardians of that. |
On various House committees — the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight panels, to be specific — Mr. Trump has been the target of pretty relentless general investigation since Democrats won back power in 2018. What took them so long to get to a case they believed was impeachment-worthy? |
There was worry early on that the public would see House Democrats newly in power and think they were only out to get the president. But if you’re not seizing on the power to perform oversight, then you’re not doing a big part of the job. They didn’t want to be defined solely by impeachment, but they also didn’t want to turn away from it if that’s where their investigations led. |
It’s worth pointing out that they spent all of last year working on other issues: gun control, prescription drugs and election reform among them. They had promised action on those issues to the voters. But they also promised that they would hold Mr. Trump accountable. |
Considering what has happened in the trial, how successful were House Democrats? |
On paper, they lost the witness vote, and they will lose when it comes to removing the president. But if you look at polling, you have overwhelming majorities in favor of hearing witnesses. You have more than half the country thinking he did something inappropriate and potentially impeachable. That doesn’t mean that the public overwhelmingly wants to see Mr. Trump removed. But it does indicate that people think it’s worthwhile to know whether he did something wrong. |
People across the spectrum don’t like a cover-up, the idea that Congress and the White House aren’t being transparent. It’s human nature. They don’t like things being hidden from them. Democrats appear to have successfully made that case — “Don’t you want to know more and hear more?” The answer was clearly yes. |
What else we’re following |
- We’re writing to you just hours before results start coming in from the Iowa caucuses. The apparent front-runner, Senator Bernie Sanders, was stuck in the Senate chamber today during closing arguments, as were Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom are running against Mr. Sanders in the Democratic primary. They were expected in Iowa this evening to follow the results. (Follow our live coverage from Iowa here.)
- Joni Ernst, a Republican senator from Iowa, said in an interview with Bloomberg that if Joe Biden were elected president, Republicans could immediately begin impeachment proceedings against him for his involvement in Ukraine when he was vice president. (Here’s a fact check of their claims about Mr. Biden’s role in the country years ago.)
- The State of the Union address is tomorrow, and a top Senate Republican had some advice for Mr. Trump on how to handle it while the impeachment trial is ongoing. “If I was him, I would avoid the subject,” said Roy Blunt of Missouri. “I think there’s plenty to talk about, and it’s an opportunity to move on.”
|
| This newsletter is soon coming to an end, and I’d love to know what you thought of it. Email us at briefing@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward you the briefing? Sign up here. |
