With his Senate trial to carry on in earnest next week, President Donald Trump has added some high-profile lawyers to his legal team, including Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsels Kenneth Starr and Robert Ray.
Word of the new firepower came as House impeachment managers and Trump's attorneys worked to produce legal briefs ahead of the Senate's return Tuesday after the holiday weekend.
The Senate trial opened Thursday during a swirl of new allegations about Trump's dealings with Ukraine, including an assertion from Lev Parnas -- a former associate of Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani -- that Trump knew of Parnas' role in the effort to dig up dirt in Ukraine that could benefit the president politically.
Democrats released more documents late Friday from Parnas with photos, text and audio, as they make their case against the president over his actions toward Ukraine. The documents included numerous photos of the Soviet-born Florida businessman, including several with Giuliani and some with Trump and Trump's son, Don Jr.
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It also included messages between Parnas and a staff member for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., a Trump ally.
The impeachment charges center on the allegation that Trump withheld military aid and a White House meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
On Dec. 18, the House passed two articles of impeachment -- abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The trial formally began Thursday after seven House managers, led by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., arrived in the Senate to present the charges.
Trump's team is being led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone. It will include Jay Sekulow, a personal lawyer to the president, and Pam Bondi, a former Florida state attorney general who has been a spokeswoman for the defense effort, and Jane Serene Raskin, who defended Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, officials said.
Giuliani told The Associated Press that the president has assembled a "top-notch" defense team and he was not disappointed not to be included.
Starr, whose investigation into former President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice in 1998, will be joined by Ray, his successor as independent counsel who negotiated a final settlement with Clinton that included a fine and law license suspension, according to a person briefed on the plan. Also, he was part of the Whitewater investigation of the Clintons.
Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus who became famous as a defense counsel for high-profile defendants like O.J. Simpson, will have a more limited role than the two former independent counsels, presenting oral arguments at the Senate trial "to address the constitutional arguments against impeachment and removal," the legal team said in a statement.
The built-out team, which will be led by Cipollone and Sekulow, faces the dual challenge of preserving the president's support among Republican senators and presenting his case to the wider public watching on television during an election year. As long as Senate Republicans stick with Trump as expected, his accusers will not be able to muster the two-thirds vote required for conviction.
In choosing Starr, Dershowitz and Ray, the president in effect assembled his view of an all-star television legal team. While best known to the general public in the 1990s, all three have made the rounds of Fox News and other media outlets lately to defend Trump and accuse House Democrats of pursuing a partisan witch hunt, appearances that appealed to the president, who complains that many of his allies do not defend him vigorously enough.
'NO FIRE BREATHERS'
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said he was pleased with the team. "I was encouraged by it," he said.
Steve Bannon, the president's former chief strategist who has been hosting a daily radio show and podcast on impeachment with a group that often coordinates with the White House, said the addition of Dershowitz and Starr brought impressive legal power to Trump's team.
But he expressed concern that "there are no fire breathers," as he put it. "It's very conventional in its makeup and approach. But this is not playing on C-SPAN. The senators are not the jury; the American people are the jury. I strongly believe you need some of the fire breathers from the House, like Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and Lee Zeldin."
Trump initially wanted three of those congressmen, among his most stalwart House Republican allies, to be on the defense team, but Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, rejected the idea. Other advisers to Trump also expressed concerns about having members of the House involved with a Senate trial.
Those House members, who are familiar with the testimony provided by witnesses during the impeachment inquiry, are expected to help behind the scenes and to help defend the president on television, people familiar with the plan said.
Trump's team also is preparing for the possibility that witnesses will be called in the trial, despite McConnell's hope to avoid it.
The president has wanted media-savvy defenders who could play the same vocal role that Giuliani did during the Russia investigation by Mueller. Dershowitz has been a media figure for years, and Starr was a contributor to Fox News until parting ways with the network because of his new role with Trump.
But neither appointment is without controversy, and Republicans on Friday voiced private reservations about both men.
Dershowitz has faced questions about his representation of Jeffrey Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender who killed himself in a New York City jail in August. Dershowitz helped negotiate Epstein's lenient sentence in 2008. He also has been accused of engaging in sex with an underage girl he met through Epstein; he has denied the claim.
Starr, who helped Dershowitz on the Epstein defense in 2007, was forced from his job as president of Baylor University in 2016 over accusations that he did not respond to allegations of sexual assault made by women against members of the school's football team.
Trump himself has previously questioned Starr's zealous pursuit of Clinton. In 1999, after the House voted to impeach the president largely along party lines, Trump told interviewers that Starr was a "wacko" and a "lunatic." But more recently, he is said to have enjoyed watching him on television.
Starr declined to comment Friday.
LEGAL BRIEFS DUE
A legal brief laying out the contours of the Trump defense, due at noon Monday, was still being drafted, with White House attorneys and the outside legal team grappling over how political the document should be. Those inside the administration have echoed warnings from McConnell that the pleadings must be sensitive to the Senate's more staid traditions and leave the sharper rhetoric to Twitter and cable news.
A trial brief from House managers is due today at 5 p.m.
During his television appearances, Starr has argued that the articles of impeachment passed by the House largely along party lines were "woefully inadequate" to justify removing a president from office. He has contrasted that with his investigation into Clinton, where the president was accused of felonies for trying to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a onetime White House intern, during a sexual harassment lawsuit.
In a brief telephone interview, Dershowitz said he expected his sole role to be arguing on behalf of Trump before the Senate next Friday, making points he had made in writing and on television.
He said that he "worried about the precedent" set by the two articles of impeachment, which he described as "too vague and open-ended," and absent "high crimes and misdemeanors."
The statement announcing his appointment described Dershowitz as "nonpartisan when it comes to the Constitution," having opposed the impeachment of Clinton and voted for Hillary Clinton. "He is participating in this impeachment trial to defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent," the statement said.
The president insists he did nothing wrong, and he speaks about his treatment often, sometimes distracting from unrelated events. On Friday, as Trump welcomed the national championship Louisiana State University football team to the Oval Office for photos, he said the space had seen "a lot of presidents, some good, some not so good. But you got a good one now, even though they're trying to impeach the son of a b***h. Can you believe that?"
Information for this article was contributed by Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; by John Wagner, Josh Dawsey, Paul Kane and Michael Brice-Saddler of The Washington Post; and by Eric Tucker, Zeke Miller, David Caruso, David Pitt, Anthony Izaguirre, Sean Murphy and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/18/2020