Trump team turns Senate trial into extended Obama-Biden attack

President Donald Trump turned the Senate floor Monday into an alternate-reality impeachment of his political rivals: Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

While senators debated the Trump impeachment behind closed doors — a process now defined by whether they’ll agree to allow new witnesses to testify — his lawyers shed any pretense of persuading a band of centrist Republicans to side with the president and instead acted out a virtual prosecution of Trump’s top political nemeses.

For about two hours on Monday, Trump’s attorneys Pam Bondi and Eric Herschmann argued that it was Biden and Obama who should be investigated for corruption or abuse of power, laying out a case thick with political innuendo that has been sharply refuted by sworn witnesses during the House's impeachment inquiry late last year.

Bondi said the focus on Biden, in particular, was made necessary by the House's charges against Trump, which relied on contentions that Trump's request for Ukraine to investigate Biden was "baseless" and meant to inflict political damage.

"We would prefer not to be discussing this, but the House managers have placed this squarely at issue so we must address it," Bondi said.

And while she and Herschmann laid out their case in public, a much trickier and more consequential maneuver was playing out in the Senate’s private offices, where Republicans were wrestling with rising pressure to concede to the House’s demand to call new witnesses against Trump. There, during the Senate GOP caucus lunches and in other private off-the-floor conversations, senators grappled with new and damning revelations from former national security adviser John Bolton directly linking Trump to the withholding of aid to Ukraine — and whether they should now seek his testimony.

Trump’s lawyers, who on Saturday appeared to be making a nuanced appeal against conviction to those moderate GOP lawmakers — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — seemed to shed the attempt by Monday afternoon, instead taking shots at Democrats that seemed meant to fulfill Trump’s promise to make his critics pay during the Senate trial.

During the presentations, Democratic senators routinely scoffed at the president's lawyers when they argued that Obama had abused his power in his relationship with Russia and engaged in a quid pro quo with then-President Dmitriy Medvedev — identical accusations to the House's impeachment charges against Trump.

Bondi and Herschmann also expounded at length on allegations against Biden and his son Hunter that they said merited a corruption probe, one Democrats have called baseless. The claims against Biden are at the heart of Trump's effort to press Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. Democrats say Trump knew the charge to be baseless and simply wanted Ukraine to announce the probes as a way to damage Biden, a 2020 rival.

But the claims against Biden have become a fixture of Trump's political attacks on his potential Democratic opponent, and the Trump legal team's presentation was the most concerted case yet by the White House to push those charges into public view and hand Trump's Senate allies new ammunition to defend him in the trial.

Though the bulk of the presentations were geared toward exciting Trump's allies, there was at least one instance in which Herschmann attempted to appeal directly to Romney, who has already indicated he wants testimony from Bolton, who said he’d be willing to testify if subpoenaed. Herschmann played a clip of Obama debating Romney — then the GOP nominee for president — in 2012. In the clip, Obama mocked Romney for saying Russia was America's top geopolitical foe. Herschmann made eye contact with Romney, whose seat is in the back corner of the chamber, several times while he repeatedly invoked his name. Romney visibly smirked while his colleagues turned to face him.

Trump's team also took direct aim at Democrats' heavy reliance on the role of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in their case against the president. Democrats charged that Giuliani aided Trump's pressure campaign in Ukraine by ginning up smears against an anti-corruption U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, and prompting Trump to remove her.

Trump attorney Jane Raskin offered a short presentation defending Giuliani's role — earning plaudits from the former New York City mayor on Twitter — by referring to him as an "internationally recognized expert on fighting corruption" and accusing Democrats of using his efforts in Ukraine as a "colorful distraction" to undermine Trump.

Perhaps most notably, the Trump legal team mostly ignored the new bombshell claims from Bolton that have injected new uncertainty into the trial.

“We deal with transcript evidence. We deal with publicly available information. We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all,” Jay Sekulow, Trump’s lead personal attorney for the trial, said as he opened up the second day of his team’s opening arguments at the Senate’s trial.

Bolton reportedly wrote in his forthcoming book that Trump told him in August that he wanted to withhold $391 million in military assistance to Ukraine until the country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed to share information pertaining to the investigations.

Former Harvard law professor and noted criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, another member of the president’s legal team, mentioned Bolton by name late Monday night as he was wrapping up his presentation — but it was the only direct reference to the former national security adviser all day.

“Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” Dershowitz said.

But Trump's lawyers, led by Sekulow and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, indicated early on that instead of addressing Bolton’s reported account of his conversations with Trump, they would continue presenting a defense of Trump's conduct toward Ukraine — batting aside the House's charges that Trump pressured Ukrainian officials to launch baseless investigations of his Democratic adversaries.

“They say their case is overwhelming and uncontested. It is not. They say they have proven each of the articles against president trump. They have not,” White House deputy counsel Michael Purpura said. “The facts and evidence of the case the house managers have brought exonerate the president.”

Trump attorney Patrick Philbin made the most concerted case against witnesses, but only made passing references without mentioning Bolton by name.

"[T]he right conclusion is not that this body, this chamber, should try to re-do everything, to start bringing in new evidence and bring in witnesses," he said.

Senators also heard from Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel who pushed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Starr, a member of the president’s defense team, delivered lofty remarks comparing impeachment to “domestic war” and “hell.”

Dershowitz closed Trump’s defense late Monday, arguing that both of Democrats' articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — are not legitimate impeachable offenses.

But Bolton's revelation presents an existential threat to the Trump defense, which has maintained for months that Democrats could not produce a single witness who could assert, with firsthand knowledge, that Trump linked the aid freeze to the investigations he sought. Bolton’s reported account also undercuts the White House’s justification for the hold on aid — that Trump wanted to pressure other countries to contribute to Ukraine’s defense, too.

So far, Republicans have mostly cast aside Bolton’s reported account, with some suggesting Bolton was just trying to boost his book sales and others saying the claims are nothing new. Democrats, meanwhile, have renewed their calls for testimony from Bolton and other officials, including additional documents that the White House withheld during the House’s inquiry last year.

Though the Democratic-led effort has sputtered in recent days, Romney said he thinks it is “increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton."

Bolton’s reported account also highlights the rapidly unfolding nature of the case against Trump, even since the House’s Dec. 18 vote to impeach him on two charges. An indicted associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, provided text messages and sat for media interviews; internal White House documents describing turmoil over Trump’s decision to withhold Ukraine aid continued to emerge; and a nonpartisan congressional watchdog declared the hold unlawful.

Trump took the reins of his own defense after midnight on Monday, denying Bolton's reported account.

“I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens,” he tweeted. “In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.”

Hours later, Trump falsely claimed that Democrats never sought Bolton's testimony in their impeachment inquiry last fall. Democrats asked for Bolton to appear on Nov. 7, but he declined, initially deferring to Trump's direction.

Bolton has since said he would appear for testimony before the Senate if he is subpoenaed; but at least four Senate Republicans would need to join with all Democrats in order to issue that subpoena.

Trump's denial underscores another Democratic demand: that the Senate seek contemporaneous documents that the president has blocked, too. Bolton, a notoriously prolific note-taker, told other witnesses to document and report their concerns about Ukraine to their superiors, and Democrats are confident he would have kept an account of his interactions with Trump.

“It is almost certain that his notes were the basis for writing his manuscript and would be contemporaneous or near contemporaneous,” said a Democratic aide working on the impeachment trial. Notes taken immediately after a conversation are generally viewed as more trustworthy in legal circles than after-the-fact testimony after a significant amount of time has passed.

The House's impeachment prosecutors, led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), have argued that the Senate must demand these documents in order to ensure the outcome of the impeachment trial is valid. Senate Republicans have scoffed at Democrats' calls to subpoena witnesses and documents, contending that it is a sign of weakness in the House's case. But Schiff said Bolton’s reported account only further highlighted the need for his testimony, and he said he was heartened that some senators “appear to be reconsidering” their opposition to bringing in witnesses.

“[Bolton] obviously has such relevant information to shed on the most egregious of all the charges in the articles of impeachment,” Schiff told reporters before Monday’s session on the Senate floor.

The leak of Bolton's manuscript threatens to become the most pivotal flashpoint in a week-old trial that has revolved around questions about whether Senate Republicans will allow the House to call witnesses like Bolton, and obtain supporting documents.

Melanie Zanona contributed to this report.