Donald Trump impeachment: POTUS' legal team dodges question regarding Ukraine

The entire week at the Senate was given to President Donald Trump’s legal team to lay their defense against the charges brought by the Democrats last week. One of the updates of the trial revealed that the President’s defense team appeared to have failed to answer a very important question.

The pressure is on the Republican senators to vote on whether or not to call for witnesses, and the most important votes lie with senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski as their votes will determine that call for action or not. Politicalflare reports that they turned in a very important question that is in line with the Ukraine scandal that resulted in the trial. They asked: “Could the defense point to anything at all that demonstrated Trump cared about Ukrainian corruption - anything prior to asking Ukraine to investigate Biden?”

Trump’s legal team did not respond and instead dodged the question entirely. It bears mentioning that corruption in Ukraine was already evident prior to Zelensky’s election, and this particular corruption has ties to the Russians. The Ukrainian prosecutor that former vice president Joe Biden had a hand in the firing was not investigating the Burisma nor Hunter Biden at the time. That same prosecutor was fired because a lot of the world leaders wanted him fired due to him being in league with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Nevertheless, a good number of Republicans are still adamant in wanting Chief Justice John Roberts to name the whistleblower. However, The Guardian reports that Roberts blocked their bid once again, including his decline to read senator Rand Paul’s question out loud, which includes the name of the supposed whistleblower. Paul then clarified that he did not reference any of the alleged whistleblowers, but still included two people who worked for the national security council, one of them being the supposed whistleblower. Paul was also asked why he left the Senate chamber despite the ongoing impeachment trial.

Lead Impeachment Manager of the Democrats, Representative Adam Schiff on the other hand, criticized lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s argument that the President was supposedly acting out of public interest by requesting that Ukraine investigate the Democrats because his reelection is also in the public interest. Schiff slammed Dershowitz and said, “The only reason you make that argument is because you know your client is guilty and dead to rights.”