Donald Trump

Mike Dorning, Tribune News Service

President Donald Trump’s impeachment defence strategy has undergone a transformation — from saying his call with Ukraine’s president was “perfect,” to saying it wasn’t criminal, to claiming that it was permissible if inspired by “mixed motives,” to finally asserting that seeking foreign help to win re-election isn’t impeachable.

Trump initially said he wanted his Senate trial to vindicate his interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But the argument from his defence team has since shifted to broad legal protection for any presidential conduct.

This legal theory is especially useful for Republicans who plan to vote against allowing testimony from John Bolton, even after reports that the former national security adviser wrote in a yet-to-be-published book that Trump linked aid for Ukraine to getting Zelenskiy to announce politically motivated investigations.

“Even if everything in Bolton’s book happens to be true, I still do not believe that it rises to the level of the impeachable offences that the House has charged,” Republican Sen. John Barrasso wrote in a tweet. The reasoning is a far cry from Trump’s often-stated position that his July 2019 call with Zelenskiy was “perfect.” It even veers from the initial arguments presented by the president’s attorneys.

On the opening day of Trump’s defence, White House deputy counsel Michael Purpura offered what he called “six key facts that have not and will not change.”

“Not a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a presidential meeting, or anything else,” Purpura said, in what he described as one of the facts.

The next day, The New York Times published an account of Bolton’s draft manuscript, reporting that Trump made exactly that link in a conversation about Ukraine aid.

The evolution in the defence offered by Trump’s lawyers was underscored by their responses to senators in the question-and-answer phase of the trial. The first query from Republicans Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney asked how they should judge actions they believe were taken for “more than one motive,” including personal political advantage as well as national interest.

“If there’s both some personal motive but also a legitimate public interest motive, it can’t possibly be an offence,” Patrick Philbin, a White House lawyer on the defense team told the Senate.

Another Trump defenc0e attorney, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, went even further, saying a president can’t be impeached for taking actions that are motivated by a desire to help his political prospects.

“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest,” Dershowitz said in response to a question from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. “And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

House impeachment prosecutor Adam Schiff said that argument “would have terrified the founders” of the country. He said that would be like Congress saying “that a president can abuse their power in a corrupt way to help his reelection.”

Others suggested the argument echoed Richard Nixon’s famous statement in his interview with David Frost: “’Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Dershowitz sought to walk back his statement on Thursday morning with a series of tweets saying the media distorted his answer.

“They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything,” Dershowitz tweeted.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer kept up the criticism in a Thursday morning news conference. “Republicans have gone from denying what the president did to normalizing it by saying every president does it, to now saying there’s nothing wrong with it even if he did it,” Schumer said. “Incredible.”