Ousting Trump would be ‘massive interference’ in election, says defence

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for U.S. President Donald Trump told his Senate impeachment trial on Saturday that Democrats’ efforts to remove the president from office would set a “very, very dangerous” precedent in an election year.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, the head of the defence team, told senators they would be denying voters their right to give their opinion on Trump at the Nov. 3 presidential election if they found him guilty and ousted him now.

In only the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history, Democrats argued earlier this week that Trump should be removed for encouraging Ukraine to interfere in the election by pressuring its leader to dig up dirt on former Vice-president Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democratic presidential contender.

The defence tried to turn that election interference line against the Democrats in its opening argument on Saturday by warning against removing a president less than 10 months before Americans vote on whether to give him a second term.

“For all their talk about election interference ... they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history, and we can’t allow that to happen. It would violate our Constitution. It would violate our history. It would violate our obligations to the future,” he said in a session that ran two hours, far shorter that the Democratic arguments of the preceding days.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives impeached Trump last month on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, setting the stage for the trial in the Republican-led Senate.

Trump is expected to be acquitted in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to convict and remove a president from office. No Republican senator has voiced any support for his ouster.

Democrats rejected Cipollone’s concerns about impeaching a president in an election year.

“They argue that we must not impeach the president and remove him from office, because this would upset the election, and after all, there’s another election coming up. That argument would say that the impeachment process does not belong in the Constitution,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, part of the team that presented the House case.

While the main thrust of the defence’s argument on Saturday was to warn about the consequences of ejecting Trump from the White House, his lawyers also tried to chip away at the Democrats’ portrayal of a president who put U.S. national security goals at risk by trying to enlist a foreign country to help his own political career.