Radio Recap – Analysis: Defense Presents for Second Day

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live, we discussed the case made by President Trump’s legal team on the second day of their presentations in the Senate impeachment trial.

ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow, in his private capacity as a member of President Trump’s legal team, said on the Senate floor:

We deal with transcript evidence. We deal with publicly available information. We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all.

Jay also said:

I want to keep coming back to facts, facts that are undisputed. It is our position, as the President’s Counsel, that the President was at all times acting under his Constitutional authority, under his legal authority, in our national interest, pursuant to his oath of office.

It was clear during the proceedings that President’s legal team is very focused on the facts at hand, and on the applicable law. They are not focused on speculation, or on made up transcripts like we saw in House, but on the actual facts and the rule of law.

ACLJ Senior Military Analyst Wes Smith made the following point:

In the House, there was so much innuendo. So many of the witnesses were not fact witnesses, were testifying based on their assumptions about so many things. This whole impeachment process really is dangerous. It’s dangerous to future American presidents, to the Constitutional separation of powers. It’s dangerous really to due process and to basic fairness.

The Democrat’s presentation in the House and the managers in the Senate has been so incomplete. It’s designed to give limited information and to mislead so that they either ignore evidence, or they edit out material that damages the credibility of their arguments. In addition to that, an impeachment coming nine months before an election actually would make Congress guilty of what they are accusing the President of, interfering in the 2020 election.

ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow, who is also a member of the President’s legal team in his private capacity, joined us for a brief moment to update the audience on the impeachment proceedings:

Today you’re going to hear from, obviously, White House Counsel. You’re going to hear from the President’s top outside counsel, the namesake of the show, Jay Sekulow, and others as well.

There was so much information yesterday. Remember the first day went just a couple hours. Yesterday was the full day. Today is not going to be too long. The closing, in a sense, [will be] different. They are not the last word from us on this because we answer questions for sixteen hours. It looks like that will not start until tomorrow.

Jordan also said:

There’s a big debate coming, sixteen hours of questions. The good news to everybody is they are short responses. You don’t get twenty minutes to answer a question, so you won’t hear Congressman Adam Schiff for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. It’s limited. It could be five minutes or it could be less. That’ll be a very interesting one or two days, depending on how long the Senators go.

You can listen to the entire episode with analysis of the impeachment trial by ACLJ Director of Policy Harry Hutchison, ACLJ Senior Military Analyst Wes Smith, and me, here.