White House says Dems trying to overturn 2016 vote

Bloomberg

Donald Trump’s legal team says Democrats mounted a “brazen” bid to overturn the 2016 election, echoing the president’s aggressive posture in the first formal White House response to impeachment proceedings in the US Senate.
Two people close to the team previewed how Trump’s lawyers plan to mount his defense over the coming weeks, largely tracking public statements the president and his aides have given during the process.
The officials spoke in a call with reporters conducted on the condition of anonymity before the six-page filing was released. That document will be followed on Monday by the team’s complete legal brief in which they expand on their arguments.
The House impeachment managers filed a 111-page brief saying the president’s pattern of misconduct made him a “threat to the nation and the rule of law.” The document includes evidence the managers said “overwhelmingly” showed Trump guilty of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The White House filing denounced the House Democrats’ process as fundamentally unfair and the articles of impeachment as unconstitutional.
The document also seemed addressed as much to the president’s political supporters as it is to the US Senate, arguing that the impeachment trial was “a brazen and unlawful attempt” to invalidate the votes of Americans in the 2016 election and to meddle in the 2020 election.
“The Articles of Impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their President.”
Trump is facing two articles of impeachment stemming from efforts to persuade Ukraine to undertake an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden.
In the impeachment resolution sent to the Senate, the House of Representatives charges that Trump “solicited interference” from Ukraine in the upcoming presidential election by pressuring the government there to publicly announce the investigation.
The House also alleges that Trump conditioned $391 million in foreign aid on Ukraine’s public announcement, compromising “the national security of the US and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process.”
The people familiar with the president’s legal strategy said the filing was intended to challenge both the merits and constitutionality of the impeachment arguments.
“The articles of impeachment are constitutionally invalid on their face. They fail to allege any crime or violation of law whatsoever, let alone high crimes or misdemeanors,” the team says in the filing.
Trump and his lawyers have said repeatedly no such arm-twisting occurred, noting that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy denied the existence of a pressure campaign and stressing that foreign aid was eventually delivered to Ukraine despite the government never announcing an investigation into the Bidens.
The White House also argued that the president was justified in asking Ukraine to investigate possible corruption, and that his responsibilities required the president to be a good steward of public funds.