I really hope The Nation gives Elie Mystal some kind of bonus for working under extreme duress or something. The Justice Correspondent for the magazine took one for the team by listening to and watching all three days of the White House "legal" team's defense of Trump in the Senate impeachment trial. Mystal graced the rest of us with a twitter breakdown of their arguments in non-lawyerly (and hilarious) terms. His also wrote up a summary of Monday's proceedings in article form for The Nation:
Ken Starr argued that impeachment is no longer a constitutional provision that should be applied to a president. Michael Purpura argued that nobody ever heard Trump order a quid pro quo. Jane Raskin argued that Rudy Giuliani was a distraction, but also a great guy who did nothing wrong. Patrick Philbin argued that presidents never have to comply with congressional subpoenas they don’t like. Pam Bondi argued that corruption is rampant in Ukraine because of Joe and Hunter Biden. Eric Herschman argued that… well, he held a MAGA rally from the well of the Senate and argued that President Barack Obama should be impeached. Robert Ray argued that presidents cannot be prosecuted. And finally, Alan Dershowtiz argued that abuse of power is not an impeachable offense, while self-owning the fact that essentially no credible legal scholars agree with him.
Below are highlights from Mystal's feed from Tuesday, for those who don't enter the Twitterverse, and cannot wait for his next article in The Nation. For the most part, he just destroys Jay Sekulow, but that's mostly because he did most of the talking today. Thankfully the White House team didn't have too much to say, since Trump totally has no defense, so they barely argued for even two hours before they said weirdly that we need to LET them keep the Republic.
Sekulow reprises his line from Saturday that we should put ourselves in the shoes of the President.
Never has a President whined as much as this one, and now his personal lawyer out here is whining for him.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Sekulow is now complaining about the investigation into the *last* time Trump got help from a foreign government, as opposed to, you know, *this* time the President tried to get help to steal an election.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Jay Sekulow now questioning why @SpeakerPelosi held onto the impeachment articles for a month, suggesting that the hold belies the contention that Trump is dangerous.
ACTUALLY, we've seen that the 33 days allows Dems to WORK TO CONVINCE THE SENATE of the danger.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
... Sekulow now arguing that even if Trump said "quid pro quo" to Bolton (remember when @LindseyGrahamSC and the Republicans made quid pro quo the thing) that you STILL can't impeach Trump because... soliciting foreign election interference is okay, according to Sekulow.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Sekulow is now CROSS EXAMINING John Bolton... without the Senate actually CALLING BOLTON TO TESTIFY.
Like, Bolton is not DEAD. He's RIGHT THERE. Ask him these questions yourself!— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Sekulow makes a stirring case for why nobody should impeach Obama.
I mean, the fact that he's NO LONGER PRESIDENT is kind of enough but, don't worry, Sekulow has us covered.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Sekulow: "Did Congress come through with some kind of constitutionally mandated accommodations process to... NO THEY DID NOT."
For those who missed it: Sekulow made up a constitutional "mandate" out of thin air, then found Congress in violation of it.#ImpeachmentTrial— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Let me try, and see if it works for me:
"Did Sekulow go through the constitutionally mandated lie detector NO HE DID NOT."
Funsies.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Thank Christ, he's done.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
I think we can ALL agree with Mystal on that last. I mean, how many times could we listen to Jay Sekulow say "DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!"? Though it did prompt probably the best of the tweets:
If Twitter doesn't give me a gif of Jay Sekulow's head on top of Will Robinson's robot by close of business, I'm cancelling my subscription. :)
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
He ended by summarizing Pat Cipollone's super weird closing argument, which was like a Godfather take on Benjamin Franklin's famous line about the republic.
Pat Cipollone closes by playing House managers objecting over to impeachment of Clinton over an extra-marital affair.#ImpeachmentTrial
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
This is the first halfway decent argument they've made... IF you have a lobotomy and forget that they were railing against impeachment over an affair as opposed to impeachment over trying to steal an American election.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
Cipollone: "It's a republic, if you LET US keep it."
He thinks he's riffing on the Ben Franklin line. He's actually putting the Republican philosophy on full display. We can only have a republic if Republicans are allowed to steal elections.— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
And finally,
Folks... I've made it through, gavel-to-gavel, for all the House Managers presentations and all the Trump lawyer's presentation.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 28, 2020
And he did it without setting himself on fire...a real concern a few hours into Monday's arguments. Someone buy that guy a drink.
