The House’s impeachment managers quickly responded to the Trump defense team’s six-page rebuttal, calling their claims “dead wrong,” and having “no basis in the Constitution.” Team Trump’s tiny defense – six pages in the face of a 111-page indictment – has already been panned by experts as reading “as though it was written by a ninth-grader who saw an episode of ‘Law & Order’ and learned just enough legal terms to throw them around incorrectly.”
The impeachment managers, led by Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, blast Trump claims.
“President Trump maintains that the Senate cannot remove him even if the House proves every claim in the Articles of impeachment. That is a chilling assertion. It is also dead wrong,” they write.
“In his view, the American people are powerless to remove a President for corruptly using his Office to cheat in the next election by soliciting and coercing a foreign power to sabotage a rival and spread conspiracy theories helpful to the President. This is the argument of a monarch, with no basis in the Constitution.”
They do not hold any punches nor mince any words in their response.
“President Trump engaged in a cover-up that itself establishes his consciousness of guilt. Innocent people seek to bring the truth to light. In contrast, President Trump has acted in the way that guilty people do when they are caught and fear the facts. But the stakes here are even higher than that,” they write. “In completely obstructing an investigation into his own misconduct, President Trump asserted the prerogative to nullify Congress’s impeachment power itself. He placed himself above the law and eviscerated the separation of powers. This claim evokes monarchy and despotism. It has no place in our democracy, where even the highest official must answer to Congress and the Constitution.”
Read the entire seven-page response here.