One of his handpicked congressional advocates, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — your ears may still be ringing from his defense of the President in the House — made the rounds on Fox News Tuesday. (In the Senate chamber, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow also seemed aware of the high decibel level that his ever-watching client prefers.)
Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz of O.J. Simpson defense fame, whose months of cable-jabber Trump defenses were like an informal audition for the White House legal team, put in an early-hours media blitz. On CNN Monday, he defended to Anderson Cooper his flip-flop since he argued, during the Bill Clinton impeachment case, that an actual crime is not required to impeach a president. “I wasn’t wrong,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “I’m just far more correct now.”
It was no “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” but it was a start.
The Democratic House impeachment managers likewise tried to expand the field of argument, in part by interlacing their speeches with video clips of witnesses from the House hearings in the fall. Besides breaking up the visual monotony during a marathon telecast, these served as a sort of “Previously on …” recap for the home and Senate audiences.
But also, while they laid out an argument for calling new witnesses like the former national security adviser John Bolton, the Democrats used video as a way to summon virtual testimony.
They called President Trump and his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, in news-file clips. (“Let’s go to the videotape,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York said.) They even introduced Lev Parnas, the businessman who worked with the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani on his Ukraine pressure campaign, via his interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The next best thing to a subpoena is a TV remote.
Even though Tuesday’s arguments were mostly procedural, the biggest change — Mr. McConnell’s concession against cramming arguments into two 12-hour days — was essentially a TV-scheduling decision. It meant that viewers would not be fed the trial as a massive binge, and that controversial votes would more likely be taken while viewers are still awake.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/arts/television/trump-impeachment.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.