WASHINGTON — The clock wound down on Thursday, with less than five hours left for senators to pose questions to impeachment trial lawyers as the lawmakers consider whether to remove Mr. Trump from office.
Senators are expected to vote Friday on whether to hear new witnesses, and Republicans appeared confident that they would have enough support to block new testimony and ultimately acquit Mr. Trump.
The first part of Thursday’s session focused largely on the arguments of one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alan M. Dershowitz, who said the president has very broad powers to do what he must in order to be re-elected.
Here are some of the takeaways so far.
The chief justice rejects a provocative question from Senator Paul.
In one of the most closely watched moments, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, tried to force the chief justice to read a question aloud that included the name of a person widely thought to be the C.I.A. whistle-blower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry.
“The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted,” the chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., said after silently reading the question card.
Over the course of the Ukraine affair, Mr. Trump has called for the whistle-blower to come forward, at times suggesting that the intelligence officer was acting as a spy. Government officials normally make every possible effort to protect a whistle-blower’s identity.
When the chief justice declined to read his question, Mr. Paul left the Senate chamber and held a news conference in a nearby room where he read aloud the question himself and later posted it on social media. It “deserved to be asked,” said Mr. Paul, who has repeatedly called on media organizations to reveal the whistle-blower’s name.
Mr. Paul’s question did not mention the term “whistle-blower,” and the senator later said that he had no independent knowledge of the whistle-blower’s identity. Three names were included in the question, which addressed whether any officials on the National Security Council also worked there during the Obama administration and conspired with staff members who work for Representative Adam B. Schiff, the lead impeachment manager, to plot Mr. Trump’s impeachment.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, called for his colleagues to respect the chief justice’s position, a request that appeared to have been directed at Mr. Paul.
Schiff takes on Trump team’s view of presidential power.
Democrats have questioned a broad argument made by Alan M. Dershowitz on Wednesday, that anything a president does to help himself get re-elected is inherently in the public’s interest, including a “quid pro quo.” Mr. Dershowitz said Thursday on Twitter that his remarks had been mischaracterized.
“What we have seen over the last couple days is a descent into constitutional madness,” Mr. Schiff said, responding to a question from Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana.
Mr. Dershowitz’s argument drew attention on Wednesday when he said, “If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Mr. Dershowitz was responding to what appeared intended to be a softball question posed by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who has disparaged the impeachment case and started a podcast called “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
Democrats and many constitutional scholars have attacked Mr. Dershowitz’s claim, and Mr. Dershowitz on Thursday said his words had been misconstrued.
On Thursday, Mr. Schiff said that the argument from Mr. Trump’s defense team “compounded the dangerous arguments that they made that no quid pro quo is too corrupt if it helps your election campaign by saying, and if what you want is targeting your rival, it’s even more legitimate.”
Lawyers disagree over the use of foreign help in an election campaign.
The Democratic senators Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, and Ron Wyden, of Oregon, went after the Trump legal team’s assertion that it was acceptable for the president to seek from a foreign government derogatory information on a political opponent to improve his chances in the 2020 election.
The senators used previous comments from Mr. Trump’s handpicked F.B.I. director to disprove the Trump team’s theory.
“That is something the F.B.I. would want to know about,” the agency’s director, Christopher Wray, told senators in May when speaking about offers of foreign election assistance.
American intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Trump, at the time, responded that Mr. Wray was wrong. And weeks later, Mr. Trump said “I’d take it” if Russia offered him damaging information on a rival candidate.
The president’s lawyers on Wednesday made the point again. “Mere information is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws,” said Patrick Philbin, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers.
On Thursday, Democrats pushed back on that view emphatically.
“It would send a terrible message to autocrats and dictators and enemies of the democracy and the free world,” said one of the House managers, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York. “For the president and his team to essentially put out there for all to consume that it is acceptable in the United States to solicit foreign interference in our free elections or accept political dirt — simply to try to cheat in the next election.”
The Federal Election Commission is on the side of Mr. Wray and the House managers.
“Anyone who solicits or accepts foreign assistance risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation,” the commission’s chair, Ellen Weintraub, wrote in a memo last summer, adding that any such offer should be reported to the F.B.I.
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January 31, 2020 at 05:27AM
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3 Takeaways From Senators’ Questions to Impeachment Lawyers - The New York Times
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