Trump’s impeachment lawyers ‘tending toward conspiracy theories’ says Schumer – live trial updates | US news

That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

• The House impeachment managers continue to present their opening arguments, focusing on the first article of impeachment, abuse of power. The managers have argued that Trump’s actions meet the constitutional standard for impeachment and merit his removal from office.
• The managers have played old clips of the president’s allies to accuse them of flip-flopping on impeachment since Bill Clinton’s 1999 trial.
• The White House announced the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his election opponent, Benny Gantz, would travel to Washington Tuesday to discuss a potential peace plan.
• The Trump administration is ending temporary visas for women who come to the United States to give birth, a practice known as “birth tourism”.
• Trump claimed Democrats represented the greater threat to social security, just a day after the president said he would consider cuts to entitlement programs.

Maanvi will have more updates and analysis from the impeachment trial, so stay tuned.

Lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff has finished speaking for now and has ceded the floor to fellow House Democrat Zoe Lofgren.

The California congresswoman started her presentation by outlining Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and the 2016 investigation.

Lofgren pointed to a letter Giuliani sent to the Ukrainian president-elect to demonstrate how the president’s personal lawyer acted with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.”

Lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff has been presenting 10 points that he says prove Trump was acting in his own self-interest when he inquired about Ukraine investigating Joe Biden and the 2016 election.

“There is no evidence that Trump cared one wit about anti-corruption efforts at all,” Schiff said.

The House intelligence committee chairman said Trump’s actions made clear that he was only inrerested in Ukrainian corruption as far as it could benefit his own reelection prospects.

After suggesting in a CNBC interview that his administration would consider cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security, Trump sent out a tweet claiming Democrats posed the greatest threat to retirees’ benefits.

Asked yesterday about whether he would consider entitlement cuts, Trump said, “At the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look.”

Social security has also become a key issue in the Democratic presidential primary, as Bernie Sanders attacks Joe Biden for past comments he has made indicating an openness to changing requirements for entitlement programs.

Leaving the White House to attend the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting at Trump National Doral in Florida, the president ignored shouted questions from reporters.

Trump usually revels in engaging in “chopper talk” as he departs the White House, but these free-wheeling question and answer sessions have somewhat subsided in recent months.

Lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff criticized Trump for peddling the baseless claim that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election.

Schiff cited a comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin made in November to underscore the danger of Trump’s claims. “Thank God nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in the U.S. elections,” Putin said at the time. “Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

“You gotta give Donald Trump credit for this: he has made a religious man out of Vladimir Putin,” Schiff darkly joked.

Lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff cast doubt upon the idea that Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, pushed for investigations in Ukraine without Trump’s consent.

“Rudy Giuliani is not some Svengali here, who has the president under his control,” Schiff said. “You can say a lot of things about President Trump, but he is not led by the nose by Rudy Giuliani.”

The Senate impeachment trial has resumed after a brief recess, and lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff has taken the floor.

Shortly before the break, Sylvia Garcia showed head-to-head polling between Joe Biden and Trump to argue the president had a political motive in pushing Ukraine to investigate the former vice president.

But Schiff took a moment to offer the disclaimer that the impeachment managers’ inclusion of the polling was not meant to be taken as any kind of endorsement in the Democratic presidential primary.

Impeachment manager Sylvia Garcia has stepped off the Senate floor, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has called for a 15-minute recess in the proceedings.

The impeachment managers have presented for about two hours today, so the Democratic team should have nearly 15 hours left to present its case over the next two days.

Impeachment manager Sylvia Garcia just played a clip of FBI director Christopher Wray saying he has seen “no information” indicating Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election.

Some of Trump’s allies have pushed the baselss claim that Ukraine meddled in the election to justify the president’s alleged interest in preventing corruption in Kyiv.

“We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election,” Wray told ABC News last month.

“As far as the [2020] election itself goes, we think Russia represents the most significant threat,” he added.

As impeachment manager Sylvia Garcia delivers a defense of Joe Biden’s conduct toward Ukraine, it appears some Senate Republicans — including Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa — are openly laughing.

Impeachment manager Sylvia Garcia has interestingly spent a significant portion of her presentation defending Joe Biden’s actions toward Ukraine, as Trump continues to falsely insist that the former vice president participated in corruption.

Garcia emphasized that multiple US and Ukrainian officials have cleared Biden and his son, Hunter, of wrongdoing. Those assurances prove Trump was only pushing for an investigation of the Bidens for “his own political benefit,” Garcia said.

This line of argument is likely meant to preempt claims from Trump’s legal team that the president was encouraging the Biden investigation to sniff out actual corruption.

While impeachment manager Jerry Nadler was playing a 1999 clip of Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator and close Trump ally was not actually sitting in the trial room.

One congressional reporter speculated that Graham may have been absent because senators were given copies of Nadler’s presentation.

In the 1999 clip, Graham argued a president does not have to commit a crime to meet the constitutional standard for impeachment.

“What’s a high crime?” Graham said as Bill Clinton faced removal from office. “How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly. But I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”

Jerry Nadler has concluded speaking for now and ceded the Senate floor to his fellow impeachment manager, Sylvia Garcia.

Nadler concluded his presentation by detailing the constitutional standards for impeachment and arguing Trump’s actions meet those requirements.

“The constitution is not a suicide pact,” Nadler said. “It does not leave us stuck with presidents who abuse their power in unforeseen ways that threaten our security and democracy.

Nadler added that impeachment “exists to address threats to the political system.” “The president’s abuse of power, his betrayal of the national interests and his corruption of our elections plainly qualify as great and dangerous offenses,” he said.

The White House has announced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s election rival, will visit Washington on Tuesday to discuss a peace plan.

The meeting was first announced by vice president Mike Pence, who is visiting Israel today to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Pence said the US and Israeli leaders would discuss “regional issues, as well as the prospect of peace here in the Holy Land,” according to a pool report.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, has overseen the crafting of the administration’s peace plan, and its details remain under wraps.

But Palestinian officials have already expressed skepticism about the deal, predicting that the proposal will be heavily weighted in Israel’s favor.

Impeachment manager Jerry Nadler is making a point to use the past words of Trump’s allies against them as he makes the case for the president’s removal from office.

Nadler just played this 1999 clip of then-congressman Lindsey Graham, who served as an impeachment manager during Bill Clinton’s trial.

“What’s a high crime?” Graham said at the time. “How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly. But I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”

The strategy is interesting coming from Nadler, considering his words about the Clinton impeachment have been similarly used against him.

Republicans have often cited this 1998 quote from Nadler about impeachment to accuse him of hypocrisy: “It is in fact a peaceful procedure for protecting the nation from despots, by providing a constitutional means for removing a president who misuses presidential power to make himself a tyrant or otherwise to undermine our constitutional form of government. To impeach a president, it must be that serious.”

To make the case for Trump’s removal from office, impeachment manager Jerry Nadler quoted Alan Dershowitz, who recently joined the president’s legal team.

As Bill Clinton faced removal from office in 1998, Dershowitz said of the constitutional standard for impeachment, “It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime. If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.”

As one of Trump’s lawyers, Dershowitz has changed his tune, claiming presidents can only be impeached for “criminal-like conduct,” as former Supreme Court justice Benjamin Curtis once said.

To address the inconsistency, Dershowitz retracted his 1998 comment in a four-part Twitter thread on Tuesday.

“To the extent there are inconsistencies between my current position and what I said 22 years ago, I am correct today,” Dershowitz wrote. “During the Clinton impeachment, the issue was not whether a technical crime was required, because he was charged with perjury. …

“To the extent therefore that my 1998 off-the-cuff interview statement suggested the opposite, I retract it.”