Trump's defense team relied very heavily on a dubious legal claim
Trump attorney Patrick Philbin made a shaky case against obstruction of Congress. Photo: Handout/Senate Television via Getty Imag As one might expect given the advance notice that their argument would begin with a sort of movie “trailer” overview, and the constant sarodonic references to the length of the House managers’ presentation, the president’s attorneys took only two of the three hours they were scheduled for in the fifth day of the Trump impeachment trial.
While Team Trump’s “overview” didn’t retail the common House Republican claims that impeachment represents a continuation of the Democratic conspiracy to shift blame to the president’s Russian allies for Ukraine’s efforts to rig the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton, Sekulow did promote the idea that the Ukraine scandal was cooked up when the Mueller investigation came up emptier than some had expected, as the New York Times...
Team Trump characterized all the testimony in the House Intelligence Committee suggesting that the president was holding military aid hostage to a Ukrainian announcement of a Biden investigation as mere conjecture on the part of people not relying on POTUS’ own words.
While Trump’s attorneys were far from systematic in their initial presentation, it was enough for his political allies in and beyond the Senate, who treated its brevity as a virtue.
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