The moment impeachment managers realized how corrupt Trump's defense was

[Zorro]

The White House claimed it hadn’t been given rights it had refused to use.

As soon as Pat Philbin, the deputy White House counsel, uttered the lie, my head shot up from my note-taking. “In the Judiciary Committee,” he said to every member of the U.S. Senate assembled for his boss’s impeachment trial, “.?.?. there were no rights for the president.”

It was just past 10 p.m. on Jan. 21 — the first day of President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. I was sitting near the head of the narrow, curved House managers table across from committee Chairmen Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). They, too, looked astonished.

I had come to know, and like, the man with the slightly nasal drawl now peddling Trump’s falsehoods. Philbin was recognized for his integrity: The erudite former George W. Bush administration official had famously rushed (along with Jim Comey) to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004. They were trying to block the White House from taking advantage of Ashcroft’s illness to extend a domestic surveillance program. Philbin’s insistence on principle had cost him career advancement. Later, as co-impeachment counsels for the House Judiciary Committee, Barry Berke and I had spent much of the past year negotiating subpoenas and legal issues with Philbin, an erudite former Bush administration official.

Among those negotiations was a call on Dec. 5, when we reaffirmed all of the rights for Trump that Philbin was now claiming we had withheld: “The president had no opportunity to present his defense, no opportunity to present witnesses, no opportunity to be represented by counsel and no opportunity to present evidence whatsoever in three rounds of hearings,” he told the Senate. Which certainly wasn’t true of our committee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-impeachment-senate-trial/2020/07/31/7a01e764-d29c-11ea-8d32-1ebf4e9d8e0d_story.html

[Grasswire2]

1. kick

Orwell was an optimist.

[Wounded Bear]

2. K & R...for visibility...nt

[KPN]

4. Good article that expresses what we here all

realized immediately while watching the proceedings. There has never been an administration as corrupt and bereft of moral impulse. The tRump presidency has exposed the reality that our Constitution is only as good as those who are and have been tasked with the “privilege” of administering it. Unfortunately, the Republican Party chose long ago to use for its own interests rather than adhere to its intentions in “administering” the Constitution. This, the tRump reign of horror we are now experiencing, is the end result of that long ago choice.

[dalton99a]

5. Kick