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The House Managers Present Their Closing Arguments In The Senate Trial To Impeach President Donald Trump. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired February 03, 2020 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[11:00:00]

ERIN BURNETT, CNN ANCHOR: We are. We can see it on the screen. We're just moments away from the gaveling in of the session.

And, Chris, you know this is the closing arguments, right? It is going to be what we already heard. Obviously, you're going to get the two hours of the very best they think they can put forth. This is what they think will stand the test of time.

It is going to be -- this is going to be a crucial, in a sense, Cliff notes for anyone who hasn't been watching every day and watching the 24-hour presentation, this is the two-hour version.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, a little bit of a different dynamic. You and I are both parents, so many people watching this are, too. This is where the kids have to fess up that they know that we know that they did what we were accusing them of all along but they don't believe they should be punished the way they know is coming.

These Senators, especially on the Republican side, are going to say, look, what he did was wrong, I wouldn't have done it, but he should have done it a different way but I'm not empowered to remove him, you should decide this.

But they're going to have a hang-up, Erin. They told the American people they don't get the right to decide because they're not going to get the witnesses, they're not going to get the documents.

Manu is checking for us. Manu Raju is up there to see when the chief justice is going to get in there and get seated because that's going to be the actual official start.

Manu, what is the word for me and Erin?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I just had a chance to talk to several Republicans, who are actually not going nearly as far as Lamar Alexander did, the Tennessee Republican, who criticized the president's conduct but said it was not impeachable.

I just talked to several who said they believe the president did not do anything wrong, including James Lankford, of Oklahoma, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican running for re-election. But also Marsha Blackburn. She said -- I asked her whether the president did anything inappropriate. She didn't quite say but she certainly didn't criticize the president.

While we'll hear some Republicans take the line, starting later today, when they're able to make floor speeches, that the president acted inappropriately but did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Others will defend his conduct.

So watch for that split to emerge within the Senate Republican conference starting with the floor speeches beginning today, into tomorrow, into the day after.

And also wait to hear more of Democrats' call for action in the House.

I talked to presidential candidate, Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democratic Senator. I asked her if she believes the House should subpoena John Bolton, now that the Senate is not going that route. She said somebody should subpoena John Bolton. Expect those calls to intensify in the coming days.

And we'll see what Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, decides to do. He's declined to comment so far about what his next steps are.

But clearly, even though we're getting to the closing arguments today, and the president is expected to be acquitted by Wednesday afternoon, this debate will not stop. Neither will what will happen in the House, assuming they do take additional steps to either pursue witness testimony, issue subpoenas and the like.

A lot more to come in the days ahead -- guys?

CUOMO: Manu, thank you so much. As always, you hear anything interesting, let us know.

I see Adam Schiff there. I see Jay Sekulow there. So we see the two teams. But got to watch the chair in the middle. When the chief justice comes out, that's when this begins.

While we're waiting and in these few moments here, Alan Frumin, the idea -- how embarrassing for the Senate, the chief justice called them, you know, the -- whatever the superlative adjective was, but the best deliberative body in the world, and they weren't deliberative at all. They abused their own procedures.

ALAN FRUMIN, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: You hear Republicans say that some of them say what the president did was wrong, some of them won't concede what the president did was wrong. As far as I'm concerned, what the president did was questionable.

And if behavior is questionable, you need to examine it. And you need to examine it with the best evidence available. And the best evidence available in this case would have been live witnesses.

CUOMO: And the idea that the House should have done it? FRUMIN: Well, I can't speak for the House. That's the other body. I

can only speak for the Senate.

This is a trial. Trials have witnesses. Every impeachment trial the Senate has ever conducted has had witnesses. The average number was 33. In the Clinton case, obviously, was much fewer than that. But every trial has had witnesses.

CUOMO: And their explanation here is the people should decide, but they're not giving them the mechanism and the means to do that. How hard of a play is that?

SUSAN GLASSER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, I think that's what we're going to hear today in the closing arguments is a recognition that both sides have made some contentions that how are they going to look after this inevitable result.

And I think they're making it, who is the audience for today. And in many ways, it's the audience, the viewing audience, and CNN. It's also the audience of history.

Manu, I think, said something very interesting about this emerging dynamic within the Republican Party. The surprise to me was, in many ways, not that Republican Senators would defend a president of their own party and overwhelmingly vote to acquit, given we have never removed a president before in history.

But I think, Chris, that I expected more people to take the Lamar Alexander route. You know?

CUOMO: Here we go. Here is the chief justice walking in right now. This will be the official commencement of the proceedings, so let's listen in.

JOHN ROBERTS, CHIEF JUSTICE, U.S. SUPREME COURT: -- will convene as a court of impeachment.

The chaplain will lead us in prayer.

[11:05:08]

BARRY BLACK, U.S. SENATE CHAPLAIN: Let us pray.

(PRAYER)

J. ROBERTS: (OFF-MIKE) no objection, the journal of proceedings of the trial are approved to date. The deputy sergeant at arms will make the proclamation.

SERGEANT-AT-ARMS: Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, all persons are commanded to keep silence on pain of imprisonment while the Senate of the United States is sitting for the trials of the articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives against Donald John Trump, president of the United States.

MCCONNELL: Mr. Chief Justice? J. ROBERTS: The majority leader is recognized.

MCCONNELL: My colleagues, today the Senate will hear up to four hours of closing statements by the two sides.

MCCONNELL: We'll take a 30-minute lunch break after the House has made its initial presentation, then we'll come back and finish this afternoon.

J. ROBERTS: Pursuant to the visions of Senate Resolution 488, the Senate has provided for up to four hours of closing arguments, equally divided between the managers on the part of the House of Representative and counsel -- and the counsel for the president.

Pursuant to Rule 22 of the Rules of Procedure and Practice in the Senate, when sitting on impeachment trials, the arguments shall be open and closed on the part of the House of Representatives. The presiding officer recognizes Mr. Manager Schiff to begin the presentation on the part of the House of Representatives.

CROW: Mr. Chief Justice, members of the U.S. Senate, counsel for the president, almost 170 years ago, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts took to the well of the old Senate chamber, not far from where I'm standing. He delivered what would become perhaps his most famous address, the Seventh of March Speech.

Webster sought to rally his colleagues to adopt the Compromise of 1850, a package of legislation that he and others hoped would forestall a civil war, brewing over the question of slavery.

He said, "It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States, a body not yet moved from its propriety, not lost to a just sense of its own dignity and its own high responsibilities, and a body to which the country looks with confidence for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels.

"It is not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agitations and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions of government. The imprisoned winds are let loose, but I have a duty to perform and I mean to perform it with fidelity. Not without a sense of surrounding dangers, but not without hope."

Webster was wrong to believe that the Compromise of 1850 could prevent secession of the South, but I hope he was not wrong to put his faith in the Senate. Because the design of the Constitution and the intention of the framers was that the Senate would be a chamber removed from the sway of temporary political winds.

[11:10:00]

In Federalist 65, Hamilton wrote, quote, "Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently signified or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people, his accusers?" In the same essay, Hamilton explained this about impeachment: "The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may, with peculiar propriety, be dominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

"The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In such cases, there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt."

Daniel Webster and Alexander Hamilton placed their hopes in you, the Senate, to be the court of greatest impartiality, to be a neutral representative of the people in determining, uninfluenced by party or pre-existing faction, the innocence or guilt of the president of the United States.

CROW: Today you have a duty to perform, with fidelity, not without a sense of surrounding dangers but also not without hope.

I submit to you on behalf of the House of Representatives that your duty demands that you convict President Trump.

Now, I don't pretend that this is an easy process. It's not designed to be easy. It shouldn't be easy to impeach or convict a president. Impeachment is an extraordinary remedy, a tool only to be used in rare instances of grave misconduct. But it is in the Constitution for a reason. In America no one is above the law, even those elected president of the United States -- and I would say especially those elected president of the United States.

You've heard arguments from the president's counsel that impeachment would overturn the results of the 2016 election. You have heard that, in seeking the removal and disqualification of the president, the House is seeking to interfere in the next election.

Senators, neither is true. And these arguments demonstrate a deeply misguided or, I think, intentional effort to mislead about the role that impeachment plays in our democracy. If you believe as we do and as we have proven that the president's efforts to use his official powers to cheat in the 2020 election jeopardize our national security and are antithetical to our democratic tradition, then you must come to no other conclusion than the president threatens the fairness of the next election and risks putting foreign interference between the voters and their ballots.

Professor Dershowitz and the other counselors to the president have argued that, if the president thinks that something is in his interest, then it is by definition in the interest of the American people. We have said throughout this process that we cannot and should not leave our common sense at the door. The logical conclusion this argument is, is that the president is the state, that his interests are the nation's interests, that his will is necessarily ours. You and I and the American people know otherwise. But we do not have to be constitutional scholars to understand that this is a position deeply at odds with our Constitution and our democracy, that believing in this argument or allowing the president to get away with misconduct based on this extreme -- extreme view would render him above the law.

But we know that this cannot be true. What you decide on these articles will have lasting implications for the future of the presidency, not only for this president but for all future presidents. Whether or not the office of the presidency of the United States of America is above the law: that is the question.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his 1835 work, "Democracy in America," quote, "The greatness of America lies not in being made more enlightened than any other nation but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

In May of 1974 Barry Goldwater and other Republican congressional leaders went to the White House to tell President Nixon that it was time for him to resign, and that they could no longer hold back the tide of impeachment over Watergate.

[11:15:00]

Now, contrary to popular belief, the Republican Party did not abandon Nixon as the Watergate scandal came to light. It took years of disclosures and crisis and court battles. The party stood with Nixon through Watergate because he was a popular conservative president and his base was with him, so they were, too.

CROW: But ultimately, as Goldwater would tell Nixon, quote, "There are only so many lies you can take, and now there have been one too many."

The president would have us believe that he did not withhold aid to force these sham investigations, that his July 25th call with the Ukrainians was perfect, that his meeting with President Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN is no different than a head of state meeting in the Oval -- Oval Office, that his only interest in having Ukraine announce investigations into the Bidens was an altruistic concern over corruption, that the Ukrainians interfered in our 2016 election, not Russia, that Putin knows better than our own intelligence agencies.

How many falsehoods can we take? When will it be one too many? Let us take a few minutes to remind you one last time of the facts of the president's misconduct as you consider how you'll vote on this important matter for our nation.

Those facts compel the president's conviction on the two articles of impeachment.

DEMINGS: Mr. Chief Justice and senators, over the past two weeks the House has presented to you overwhelming and unconverted evidence that President Trump has committed grave abuses of power that harmed our national security and were intended to defraud our elections.

President Trump abused the extraordinary powers he alone holds as president of the United States to coerce an ally to interfere in our upcoming presidential election for the benefit of his own re-election. He then used those unique powers to wage an unprecedented campaign to obstruct Congress and cover up his wrongdoing.

As the president schemed to corrupt our election progressed over several months, it became, as one witness described, "more insidious." The president and his agents wielded the powers of the presidency and the full weight of the U.S. government to increase pressure on Ukraine's new president to coerce him to announce two sham investigations that would smear his potential election opponent and raise his political standing.

By early September of last year, the president's pressure campaign appeared on the verge of succeeding until, that is, the president got caught and the scheme was exposed. In response, President Trump ordered a massive cover-up, unprecedented in American history. He tried to conceal the facts from Congress using every tool and legal window dressing he could to block evidence and muzzle witnesses.

He tried to prevent the public from learning how he placed himself above country and yet, even as President Trump has orchestrated this cover-up and obstructed Congress's impeachment inquiry, he remains unapologetic, unrestrained and intent on continuing his sham to defraud our elections.

As I stand here today delivering the House's closing argument, President Trump's constitutional crimes, his crimes against the American people and the nation remain in progress. As you make your final determination on the president's guilt, it is therefore worth revisiting the totality of the president's misconduct. Doing so lays bear the ongoing threat President Trump poses to our democratic system of government, both to our upcoming election that some suggest should be the arbiter of the president's misconduct, and to the Constitution itself that we all swore to support and defend.

[11:20:00]

Donald Trump was the central player in the corrupt scheme assisted principally by his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Early in 2019, Giuliani conspired with two corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutors to fabricate and promote phony investigations of wrongdoing by former Vice President Joe Biden as well as the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine, not Russia that hacked the DNC in 2016.

In the course of their presentation to you, the president's counsel have made several remarkable admissions that affirm core elements of this scheme, including specifically about Giuliani's role and representation of the president.

The president's counsel has conceded that Giuliani sought to convince Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and alleged Ukraine election interference on behalf of his client, the president, and that the president's focus on these sham investigations was significantly informed by Giuliani, whose views the president adopted.

Compounding this damning admission, the president's counsel has also conceded that Giuliani was not conducting foreign policy on behalf of the president. They have confirmed that in pursuit -- pursuing these two investigations, Giuliani was working solely in the president's private, personal interest and the president's personal interest is now clear -- to cheat in the next election.

As Giuliani would later admit, for the president's scheme to succeed, he first needed to remove the American Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption champion Giuliani viewed as an obstacle who, and I quote, "was getting -- was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody."

Working with now indicted associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Giuliani orchestrated a bogus, months long smear campaign against the Ambassador that culminated in her removal in April. The president's sudden order to remove our Ambassador came just three days after Ukraine's presidential election in late April, which saw a reformer, Volodymyr Zelensky, swept into office on an anti-corruption platform.

President Trump called to congratulate Zelensky right after his victory. He invited President Zelensky to the White House and agreed to send Vice President Pence to his inauguration. But three weeks later, after Rudy Giuliani was denied a meeting with President Zelensky, President Trump abruptly -- abruptly ordered Vice President Pence to cancel his trip.

Instead, a lower level delegation led by three of President Trump's political appointees, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker attended Zelensky's inauguration the following week.

These three returned from Ukraine impressed with President Zelensky. In a meeting shortly thereafter with President Trump in the Oval Office they relayed their positive impression of the new Ukrainian president and encouraged President Trump to schedule the White House meeting he promised in his first call. But President Trump reacted negatively. He railed that Ukraine tried to take me down in 2016, and in order to schedule a White House visit for President Zelensky, President Trump told the delegation that they would have to, and I quote, "talk to Rudy".

It is worth pausing here to consider the importance of this meeting in late May. This is the moment that President Trump successfully hijacked the tools of our government to serve his corrupt personal interests, when the president's domestic political errand, as one witness famously described it, began to overtake and subordinate U.S. foreign policy and national security interests.

By this point in the scheme, Rudy Giuliani was advocating very publicly for Ukraine to pursue the two sham investigations, but his request to meet with President Zelensky was rebuffed by the new Ukrainian president. According to reports about Ambassador Bolton's account -- soon to be available if not to this body, then to bookstores near you.

[11:25:00] The president also unsuccessfully tried to get Bolton to call the new Ukrainian president to ensure he would meet with Giuliani.

The desire for Ukraine to announce these phony investigations was for a clear and corrupt reason: because President Trump wanted to politically benefit -- wanted the political benefit of a foreign country announcing that it would investigate his rival. That is how we know without a doubt that the object of the president's scheme was to benefit his reelection campaign; in other words, to cheat in the next election.

Ukraine resisted announcing the investigations throughout June, so the president and his agent, Rudy Giuliani, turned up the pressure, this time by yielding (sic) the power of the United States government. In mid-June, the Department of Defense publicly announced that it would be releasing $250 million of military assistance to Ukraine. Almost immediately after seeing this, the president quietly ordered a freeze on the assistance to Ukraine. None of the 17 witnesses in our investigation were provided with a credible reason for the hold when it was implemented, and all relevant agencies opposed the freeze.

In July, Giuliani and the president's opponents -- appointees made clear to Ukraine that a meeting at the White House would only be scheduled if Ukraine announced the sham investigations. According to a July 19 e-mail the White House has tried to suppress, this drug deal, as Ambassador Bolton called it, was well-known among the president's most senior officials, including his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and it was relayed directly to senior Ukrainian officials by Gordon Sondland on July 10 at the White House. Everyone was in the loop.

Although President Zelensky explained that he did not want to be a pawn in Washington politics, President Trump did not care. In fact, on July 25, before President Trump spoke to President Zelensky, President Trump personally conveyed the terms of this quid pro quo to Gordon Sondland, who then relayed the message to Ukraine's president.

Later that morning, during the now-infamous phone call, President Trump explicitly requested that Ukraine investigate the Bidens and the 2016 election. Zelensky responded as President Trump instructed. He assured President Trump that he would undertake these investigations. After hearing this commitment, President Trump reiterated his invitation to the White House at the end of the call.

Now, no later than a few days after the call, the highest levels of the Ukrainian government learned about the hold on military assistance. Senior Ukrainian officials decided to keep it quiet, recognizing the harm it would cause to Ukraine's defense, to the new government standing at home and to its negotiating posture with Russia. Officials in Ukraine and the United States hoped that the hold would be reversed before it became public. As we now know, that was not to be.

As we have explained during the trial, the president's scheme did not begin with the July 25th call, and it did not end there, either. As instructed, a top aide to President Zelensky met with Giuliani in early August, and they began working on a press statement for Zelensky to issue that would announce the two sham investigations and lead to a White House meeting.

Now, let's be very clear here. The documentary evidence alone -- the text messages, the e-mails that we've showed you -- confirms definitely the president's corrupt -- definitively the president's corrupt quid pro quo for the White House meeting. Subsequent testimony further affirms that the president withheld this official act, this highly-coveted Oval Office meeting, to apply pressure on Ukraine to do his personal bidding.

[11:30:00]

END