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Republicans Codify Central Impeachment Defenses of Donald Trump

The Democrats will likely continue to whittle their arguments down into ever narrower bands of information, hoping to incriminate the President on anything that they can.

As we now enter into the first week of public impeachment hearings, the GOP will finally have their chance to make an appeal to the American people.

For the first several weeks of the Democratically-led “impeachment inquiry”, the only information being made available to We The People was coming directly from men like Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee and staunch anti-Trump rabble-rouser.  Now, with the public hearings set to start, Schiff’s stranglehold on the narrative will likely lessen, and the GOP is preparing themselves for a slightly fairer fight.

The Republican staff on the three panels involved in the impeachment investigation have drafted a detailed memo, circulated to GOP members of all three committees and obtained by CNN, outlining their defense of President Donald Trump.

Using witness testimony from the closed-door depositions, as well as public reporting, the memo attempts to undercut several key arguments made by Democrats outlining the alleged culpability of Trump in his actions toward Ukraine, particularly in his decision to place a hold on US security assistance to the country in exchange for investigations into his political rival.

The memo marks the most centralized and detailed effort to lay out the Republican counterargument to impeachment that has been crafted and will serve as the baseline for members to utilize in their defense of Trump as the impeachment probe moves into public hearings on Wednesday.

    • The July 25 call summary “shows no conditionality or evidence of pressure.”

    • Ukrainian “President (Volodymyr) Zelensky and President Trump have both said there was no pressure on the call.”

    • “The Ukrainian government was not aware of the hold on U.S. assistance” during the July 25 call.

    • The security assistance hold was lifted on September 11.

The Democrats will likely continue to narrow the focus of the investigation, in hopes that this sliver of understanding will affect voters in the 2020 election, given the fact that Trump will be swiftly acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate.

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