The fight over calling witnesses to testify in US President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial intensified on Tuesday after Trump’s lawyers closed their defence, calling the abuse of power charges against him politically motivated.
Democrats sought to have the Senate subpoena former White House national security advisor John Bolton to provide evidence after leaks from his forthcoming book suggested he could supply damning evidence against Trump.
But Republicans threatened to demand that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and his son Hunter also testify, in a move aimed at damaging the party’s possibly best chance of defeating Trump in the November election.
“If people want witnesses, we’re going to get a lot of witnesses,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
At only the third ever presidential impeachment trial in US history, Trump’s lawyers closed out their three-day defence in the Senate by calling for his speedy acquittal and accusing Democrats of bringing politically motivated charges in an attempt to reverse his 2016 election victory.
“What they are asking you to do is to throw out a successful president, on the eve of an election, with no basis and in violation of the Constitution,” Trump’s lead counsel Pat Cipollone said.
“The American people are entitled to choose their president,” he told the senators sitting as the jury. “We urge the Senate to reject these articles of impeachment.”
Trump is accused of cheating in his 2020 reelection effort by pressuring vulnerable ally Ukraine to announce investigations into both Bidens and a spurious conspiracy theory, promoted by Russia, that Kiev helped the Democrats in 2016.
The impeachment charges say the president froze vital military aid to Ukraine for two months last summer to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to publicly announce the probes, illicitly drawing a foreign nation into US electoral politics.
Trump’s lawyers mostly steered clear of those specific allegations.
Instead, they argued that the impeachment case was rooted in “policy differences” and that the charges against him, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, are too weak and thinly-sourced to justify his removal from office.
They said a conviction would set a precedent for US politics that would result in retribution-driven political battles for years to come.
“The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low. If partisan impeachment is now the rule of the day . . . future presidents – Democrats, Republicans – will be paralysed the moment they are elected,” said Jay Sekulow, another Trump lawyer.
Adam Schiff, the head of the Democrats’ prosecution team, said that Republicans’ arguments were “not particularly relevant to the charges against the president”.
“The president’s lawyers did not, cannot, defend the president on the facts,” he said.