Radio Recap – Analysis: President’s Team Wraps Up Opening Defense

Yesterday, the President’s legal team wrapped up its defense on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live, we played clips and provided analysis of the legal team’s defense of President Trump before the U.S. Senate.

ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow, acting in his private capacity as a member of President Trump’s legal team, made the following point on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday:

The President of the United States, before he was the President, was under an investigation. It was called Crossfire Hurricane. It was an investigation led by the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. James Comey eventually told the President a little bit about the investigation and referenced the Steele dossier. James Comey, the then Director of the FBI, said it was salacious and unverified. So salacious and unverified that they used it as a basis to obtain FISA warrants. Members, managers here, managers at this table right here said that any discussions on the abuse from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act utilized to get the FISA warrants from the court were conspiracy theories.

I told you at the very beginning, I asked you, put yourselves in the shoes of not just this President, of any President that would have been under this type of attack.  FISA warrants were issued on people affiliated with his campaign. American citizens affiliated with people of his campaign. Citizens of the United States being surveilled pursuant to an order that has now been acknowledged by the very court that issued the order that it was based on a fraudulent presentation.  In fact, evidence specifically changed – changed by the very FBI lawyer who was in charge of this.

Here’s Jay’s powerful close to his presentation yesterday:

We’ve laid out, I believe, a compelling case on what the Constitution requires. When they were in the House of Representatives putting this together, did they go through a constitutionally mandated accommodations process to see if there was a way to come up with something? No, they did not. Did they run to court? No. And the one time it was about to happen, they ran the other way.

Separation of powers means something. It’s not separation of powers and other nonsense. If we’ve reached now, at this very moment in the history of our republic, a bar of impeachment, because you don’t like the President’s policies or you don’t like the way he undertook those policies, because we hear a lot about policies. If partisan impeachment is now the rule of the day, which these members and members of this Senate said should never be the rule of the day. My goodness, they said it—some of them—five months ago.

But then we had the national emergency – a phone call. It’s an emergency, except we’ll just wait. But if partisan impeachment based on policy disagreements, which is what this is, and personal presumptions or newspaper reports and allegations in an unsourced – maybe this is in somebody’s book who’s no longer at the White House – if that becomes the new norm, future Presidents, Democrats, Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, before they can even take the oath of office. The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.

Majority Leader McConnell, Democratic Leader Schumer, House Managers, members of the Senate, danger, danger, danger. These articles must be rejected. The Constitution requires it. Justice demands it.

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