Donald Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani (File)


House impeachment managers have set out Donald Trump’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, calling it the “worst nightmare” of America’s founders when they adopted the Constitution.

The managers filed the 46-page memorandum, with a 60-page statement of facts, for Trump’s Senate trial which formally opened on Thursday. The document details the pressure campaign by Trump, led by his attorney Rudy Giuliani, for Ukraine to investigate political rivals.

To obtain the statement of investigations, Trump froze security assistance to Kyiv, threatened by a Russian-backed separatist movement in the east of the country. He refused a White House visit to new President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

When Trump’s campaign was exposed — the catalyst being a formal complaint over his July 25 call with Zelenskiy seeking the investigations — Trump tried to cover up his acts by ordering former and current US officials to defy House subpoenas. This posed “a serious danger to our constitutional checks and balances”, the managers said.

“President Trump’s conduct is the framers’ worst nightmare,” the seven managers summarized.

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The filing used the documents and testimony of 17 former and current US officials, who defied Trump’s orders to appear in House impeachment hearings in the autumn. It also cites new evidence from Lev Parnas, a Giuliani business associate who was central in the Trump-Giuliani campaign and meetings with Ukrainians.

Noting Trump’s welcome of Russian interference on his behalf in the 2016 elections, they said the pressure on Ukraine was “part of an ongoing pattern of misconduct for which the President is unrepentant”.

[The Founders] designed impeachment as the remedy for such misconduct because a President who manipulates US elections to his advantage can avoid being held accountable by the voters through those same elections.

Trump’s Team Avoid the Evidence

In a six-page filing, Trump’s attorneys avoided the evidence. Instead, they asserted that impeachment was propelled to hurt Trump in November’s Presidential election — the same election that allegedly drove Trump to seek the investigations former Vice Presidential and Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

The articles of impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president….

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 attorneys, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, contradicted Trump’s claims that he had withheld Ukraine’s security assistance — an act ruled illegal by the Government Accountability Office last week. But they maintained, in defiance of the GAO ruling, that Trump broke no laws and was acting appropriately.

The attorneys also said Trump was trying to root out corruption in Ukraine, even though the Trump-Giuliani campaign spread disinformation and undermined US Ambassador Marie Yovaonovitch, prominent in anti-corruption efforts, according to multiple US officials.

The House managers countered that Trump’s efforts were not anti-corruption: “Rather it is corruption itself, naked, unapologetic and insidious.”