White House lawyer Jay Sekulow told the Senate on Friday that if it decided to subpoena new witnesses, the president’s legal team would demand the right to call every one of the witnesses that appeared in the House.
Sekulow noted that Democrats in the House decided to depart from past precedent and deny the White House any opportunity to cross-examine witnesses in public hearings. He said, therefore, that the White House team would call each of the fact witnesses from the House Intelligence Committee — including those who had not testified in public. He listed every one of them in turn. And he added that cross-examining them would take far longer than the “one week” that House Democrats asked the Senate to provide for new witnesses.
“You heard their testimony referred to,” Sekulow told the Senate. “We did not have the opportunity to cross examine them. So this is not going to happen if witnesses are called, in a week.
He noted that while Democrats had cited the impeachment of Bill Clinton as a case where the Senate heard from witnesses, in that case the Senate did not call new witnesses, but three who had already testified.
And he made the point that while the House impeachment managers demanded a “fair trial,” they had denied that right to the president, to whom the right belonged. “Due process is supposed to be for the person accused. And they are turning it on its head.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.