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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPoppycock, pettifogging, and foul calumny: Trump's team tries it all in Senate trial
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/28/1914595/-Poppycock-pettifogging-and-foul-calumny-Trump-s-team-tries-it-all-in-Senate-trialPoppycock, pettifogging, and foul calumny: Trump's team tries it all in Senate trial
Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday January 28, 2020 · 9:27 AM EST
Monday saw Trumps defense team roll out the big guns. Not Alan Dershowitzs universally panned effort to apply legal-ish terminology to an argument that Fifth Avenue could fill up with bodies, and Donald Trump still wouldnt be subject to impeachment. Not even the multiparty pile-up effort to use the Senate floor as a proxy for what Trump tried to extort from Ukraine, by delivering a prime-time smear of Joe Biden. No. The really big guns on Team Trump were reserved for denial, as Pat Cipollone, Jay Sekulow, and crew plunged madly on, ignoring the fact that their case was thoroughly sunk by weekend revelations.
Not that there was ever a case to begin with, since the evidence of Trumps actions in Ukraine was overwhelming and public. It might be tempting to feel some pity for a legal team charged with defending Trump against the idea that he was trying to involve a foreign government in the 2020 election, when he hasmore than onceappeared before cameras to request exactly that, and expanded the scope of his crimes by dragging China into the mix. If that werent bad enough, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney stepped in front of cameras to declare that, yep, it was true, every word of it, so Get over it. Against that backdrop, pitiful is the best that can be achieved.
Still, Team Trump worked hard on Monday to make pitiful seem like a high-water mark they were not even interested in reaching. Across the day, they took a tripartite approach: denying Trump did anything wrong, smearing Joe Biden, and declaring that abuse of power is not impeachable in roughly equaland equally badportions.
snip//
Overall, the day was an embarrassment top to bottom. Much of it, particularly Dershowitz, wasnt even the fun kind of embarrassment. It didnt rise to the ranks of so-bad-it-was-good. It was just bad. It was so bad thatother than the GOP- and Trump-pleasing section of Biden-smearingits difficult to recall a single salient point, just hours after they stopped talking.
In any case, the real case on Monday wasnt happening in front of Mitch McConnells carefully aimed camera. It was happening offscreen, where Republicans were trying desperately to calculate whether giving Trump the quick acquittal that he wantsa move that had seemed like a sure thing on Friday, despite a crackerjack case from the House managerswas still such a slam dunk. Republicans always knew that going along with Trump was going to make them part of the conspiracy. They just didnt know it was going to be this damn obvious.
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Poppycock, pettifogging, and foul calumny: Trump's team tries it all in Senate trial (Original Post)
babylonsister
Jan 2020
OP
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,389 posts)1. Republicans have always been "part of the conspiracy", with enthusiasm.