WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's legal team said Saturday that Democrats mounted a "brazen" bid to overturn the 2016 election while House Democrats said the president had betrayed public trust with behavior that was the "worst nightmare" of the Founding Fathers.
The dueling statements previewed arguments both sides intend to make once Trump's impeachment trial begins in earnest on Tuesday.
The House's 111-page brief pulled together the private and public testimony of a dozen witnesses who raised concerns about the president's actions with Ukraine. Stripped of legalese and structured in plain English, the document underscored the extent to which the impeachment proceedings are a political rather than conventional legal process.
In their brief, the House managers overseeing the prosecution wrote that it is clear that the "'evidence overwhelmingly establishes" that Trump is guilty of both charges for which he was impeached last month: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
"The only remaining question is whether the members of the Senate will accept and carry out the responsibility placed on them by the Framers of our Constitution and their constitutional Oaths," the brief states.
The Trump team, meanwhile, called the Senate's formal impeachment summons to the two articles of impeachment "a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president."
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Trump's legal team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, is challenging the impeachment on both procedural and constitutional grounds, claiming Trump has been mistreated by House Democrats and that he did nothing wrong.
In a six-page letter, Trump's first formal response to the charges against him, his lawyers denounced the impeachment case as constitutionally and legally invalid, and driven by malice toward him.
The six-page filing will be followed on Monday by the team's complete legal brief in which they expand on their arguments.
"This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away," the filing states.
The president's lawyers did not deny any of the core facts underlying Democrats' charges, that he withheld $391 million in aid from Ukraine and asked the country's president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. But they said Trump broke no laws and was acting entirely appropriately and within his powers when he did so, echoing the president's repeated protestations of his own innocence. They argued that Trump was not seeking political advantage but working to root out corruption in Ukraine.
"President Trump categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation in both articles of impeachment," Cipollone and Sekulow wrote.
Trump's answer to the summons was the first salvo in what will be several rounds of arguments before the trial formally begins. The House will be able to respond Tuesday to the Trump filing on Monday.
The House's impeachment managers are working through the weekend and will be at the Capitol midday today to prep the case.
The filings came a day after Trump finalized his legal team, adding Ken Starr, the former independent counsel whose investigation into former President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment, and Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor emeritus who intends to make constitutional arguments.
People close to the legal team said Cipollone would deliver the president's opening argument before the Senate and that Sekulow would follow. Starr and Dershowitz would have "discrete functions" on the legal team, according to those close to the legal team, who were not authorized to discuss the strategy by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
"President Trump abused the powers of his office to invite foreign interference in an election for his own personal political gain and to the detriment of American national security interests," the House brief states. "He abandoned his oath to faithfully execute the laws and betrayed his public trust.
It says: "President Trump's misconduct presents a danger to our democratic processes, our national security, and our commitment to the rule of law. He must be removed from office."
Separately, the impeachment resolution accuses the president of obstructing Congress because he instructed executive branch agencies and officials not to comply with the House investigation into the Ukraine matter.
A number of key witnesses -- including former national security adviser John Bolton and acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney -- did not comply with subpoenas or requests for testimony during the inquest, leaving Democrats without concrete proof that Trump himself had directly ordered the withholding of aid unless Ukraine opened the Biden investigations.
The White House argues that Trump was relying on long-standing and bipartisan notions of executive privilege, and that the president has an institutional right to protect internal deliberations.
The White House also chided Democrats for voting on impeachment before legal challenges to the ignored subpoenas could be completed, suggesting that the obstruction charge was little more than political pretense.
Under the Constitution impeachment is a political, not a criminal process, and the president can be removed from office if convicted of whatever lawmakers consider "high crimes and misdemeanors."
White House attorneys and Trump's outside legal team have been debating just how political Monday's legal brief laying out the contours of Trump's defense should be. Some in the administration have echoed warnings from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., that the pleadings must be sensitive to the Senate's more staid traditions and leave some of the sharper rhetoric exhibited during the House proceedings to Twitter and cable news.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters Saturday that she wants to hear both sides of the case before deciding if they need to hear new witnesses. Democrats have pushed for calling witnesses.
If Democrats try to add certain witnesses to an organizing resolution, Murkowski said she expects McConnell would move to table such a request and that she would support a tabling motion.
"Because what I've worked hard to do is make sure that we have a process that will allow for that determination" -- whether witnesses or documents are needed, she said. "But I want to have that at a point where I know whether or not I'm going to need it."
She said there are political pressures "on all of us" but said her responsibility is "not to focus on the politics of where we are but a recognition that we are in the midst of an infrequent and in many ways extraordinary process that the Constitution allows for and I'm going to take my constitutional obligations very, very seriously."
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Zeke Miller, Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick and Becky Bohrer of The Associated Press; by Justin Sink of Bloomberg News; and by Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.
A Section on 01/19/2020