President Trump’s legal team made the White House’s resistance to cooperating with the impeachment inquiry clear in its formal response to the Senate summons Saturday evening.
In its response, Trump’s legal team — headed by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and White House counsel Pat Cipollone — characterizes the impeachment articles as “constitutionally invalid” and accuses House Democrats of staging a “dangerous attack” with a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election.”
The response also rails against charges in the impeachment articles, saying that Trump “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation in both articles of impeachment.”
When arguing against the first article, abuse of power, Trump’s legal team responded that it “alleges no crime at all, let alone ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ as required by the Constitution,” citing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s denials that he was pressured by the President during the now-infamous July phone call that was an effort to dig up false allegations against Trump’s political rivals.
The response argued that the President’s release of transcripts of both the July call and another in April show that the conversations were “perfectly legal, completely appropriate and taken in furtherance of our national interest.”
In response to the second article, obstruction of Congress, Trump’s legal team said the administration “replied appropriately to these subpoenas and identified their constitutional defects.”
Read the response below:
