President Donald Trump’s legal team officially responded to last week’s Senate summons that notified the president that if he is convicted during the impeachment trial, he will be removed from office.
Trump’s response came in a six-page letter on Saturday, according to the New York Times, where his lawyers blasted the impeachment charges, calling into question their legality and claiming the Democrats were attempting to not only “interfere” with the coming election, but to undo the 2016 results.
“The articles of impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” the response read.
The documents, written by lawyers representing the president Pat A. Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, continued, “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. President Trump categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation in both articles of impeachment.”
Trump’s lawyers did not deny any specific facts the Democrats presented in the articles. Instead, the documents claim the articles are “invalid on their face” because they do not charge Trump with an actual crime.
But on Thursday, the Government Accountability Office officially announced that the president’s administration did, in fact, commit a crime, violating the Constitution by interfering with Congress’s power to appropriate funds to Ukraine. “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the report said.
Meanwhile, with his lawyers going about their business defending the president, Trump, who was at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, appeared “distracted” by the impeachment process. According to CNN, the president was asking people at the resort, “Why are they doing this to me?” adding, that he “can’t understand why” he is impeached.
