Robert Ray, an attorney on President Donald Trump’s legal defense team, on Wednesday slammed The Washington Post over an opinion piece by the newspaper’s editorial board attacking his impeachment defense.
The Post’s editorial board wrote that “Trump’s impeachment defense is designed to destroy guardrails on presidential power,” adding later that “If Republican senators go along with it, they will not only be excusing behavior that many of them believe to be improper. They will be enabling further assaults by Mr. Trump on the foundations of American democracy.”
“The principle guardrail with regard to the exercise of presidential power is called an election and, guess what? We have one just nine months away,” Ray told “America’s Newsroom” on Wednesday.
“I disagree with the foundational premise of that editorial,” he said.
The editorial board added, “The defense brief they filed Monday argues that the president ‘did absolutely nothing wrong’ when he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch investigations of [former Vice President] Joe Biden and a Russian-promoted conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. It further contends that Mr. Trump was entirely within his rights when he refused all cooperation with the House impeachment inquiry, including rejecting subpoenas for testimony and documents. It says he cannot be impeached because he violated no law.”
Ray said that the defense team is arguing that the House “jumped the gun” when it sent the articles of impeachment to the Senate without waiting for a court to rule on whether the administration can claim executive privilege to keep officials from testifying.
“Now they're seeking, essentially, to turn that around on the president by charging him with obstruction of Congress when the president did what he's lawfully entitled to do,” he said.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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