Trump Legal Team Calls on Congress to ‘Swiftly Reject’ the ‘Rigged’ Impeachment Process in New Filing

President Trump’s legal team on Monday will call on the Senate to “swiftly reject” the articles of impeachment against him, accusing his Democratic political opponents of conducting a “brazenly political” and “rigged process.”

“The Senate should speedily reject these articles of impeachment and acquit the president,” reads the 110-page trial brief. “All that House Democrats have succeeded in proving is that the President did absolutely nothing wrong.”

The trial brief also accuses House Democrats of “focus-group testing various charges for weeks” before settling on the charges of the two impeachment articles, obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday formally signed the two articles of impeachment that the House approved largely along party lines against Trump before sending them over to the Senate for a trial.

The trial is set to begin in the upper chamber on Tuesday, when senators will debate a resolution on the rules of the trial and afterwards begin opening arguments.

The brief from the president’s legal team does not deny that Trump attempted to pressure Ukraine into publicly announcing an investigation into Trump’s rival 2020 contender Joe Biden, but the filing does argue that the president has the prerogative to address corruption concerns with Ukraine as he sees fit. Democrats have accused Trump of withholding military aid from Ukraine until the country pledged to investigate allegations that Biden used his position as vice president to help a Ukrainian gas company avoid a corruption probe soon after his son, Hunter Biden, was appointed to its board of directors.

Trump’s legal team calls the impeachment articles “a dangerous perversion of the Constitution” and argues that abuse of power is not an impeachable offense unless it involves a specific crime.

The 110-page brief is scheduled for filing at noon on Monday.

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