President Donald Trump did “absolutely nothing wrong,” is the victim of a partisan plot to take him down and should be swiftly acquitted in a Senate trial, his legal team argued in a brief Monday.
The 110-page trial memo, prepared for submission to the Senate a day before the president’s impeachment trial is set to begin in earnest, counters House Democrats’ argument that Trump abused the power of his office for personal gain by working to pressure Ukraine to announce politically advantageous investigations and then, once caught, sought to obstruct Congress’ investigation.
Those two articles of impeachment, adopted by the House in December, set a dangerous precedent, Trump’s lawyers wrote in the memo released publicly by the White House Monday. House Democrats were intent during their impeachment inquiry, which lasted from last September until mid-December, “to corrupt the extraordinary power of impeachment for use as a political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 election and to interfere in the 2020 election.”
