President's legal team charges ‘massive’ election interference

FPI / January 26, 2020

Democrats not only have no case for impeaching President Donald Trump but are badly damaging democracy in their attempt to undermine the will of America’s voters, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone said Saturday in his opening argument at the Senate impeachment trial.

Since the president “did absolutely nothing wrong,” the Democrats sham impeachment amounts to election interference as they are attempting to remove Trump from the 2020 ballot, Cipollone said.

“For all their talk about election interference, they're here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history,” Cipollone said. “And we can't allow that to happen."

Cipollone continued: “It would violate the sacred trust that the American people have placed in you and have placed in them. The American people decide elections. They have one coming up in nine months.”

Trump’s legal teams will have three days and up to 24 hours to launch their defense — the same amount of time as House managers — but Cipollone told senators up front that Trump’s team would be "respectful" of the Senate’s time and make their presentations shorter and less repetitive than Democrats.

Trump's legal team also targeted the Democrats’ lead impeachment manager, Rep. Adam Schiff. Trump’s team showed video of Schiff reading the essence of Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and ripping Schiff's rendition as "a fake."

Trump’s team also showed contradictory videos of Schiff's comments about first wanting to hear from the whistleblower and then changing course over security concerns for the person who blew open the Ukraine case.

"Adam Schiff got kneecapped," Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican, told Fox News after the opening statements.

Another member of Trump’s legal team, Jay Sekulow, said the Trump team is not content to merely offer a rebuttal to Democrats impeachment arguments — they plan on attacking them.

“Adam Schiff has had a problem with the truth since he’s been holding these hearings in the House of Representatives, all the way back to the Mueller report,” Sekulow said on Fox News. “So, we will not, in a sense, it’s not a rebuttal. What we are going to do is attack.”

Trump’s team will “attack all the misstatements, all of the half-played clips that didn’t play the entire clip, the entire statement, which ends up changing the entire meaning of what they tried to imply,” Sekulow said. “I mean, how many times in those videos did you hear, did you see someone’s mouth keep going and the clip stop?”

Sekulow added: “We’re going to make sure the American people and all one hundred U.S. senators get to see exactly what those Democrat witnesses – that’s all they were: 17 Democrat witnesses – what they had to say, in full. Because, what they had to say – in full – is on our side.”

Actor Jon Voight, a longtime Trump supporter, called the impeachment proceedings a "crime" intended to "take down a nation's success."

"This is a disgrace to mankind and a disgrace to the people of the United States of America," Voight said in a video posted to social media. "For their control of deceit and disgusting lies against our President Trump, who held to his promise for our country (and) his word for our country's love."

Free Press International