Representative Adam B. Schiff, the lead House manager, for the first time took head-on the Republican criticism that he mocked President Trump during a hearing by pretending the president’s call with his Ukrainian counterpart was a mob shakedown.
At a hearing in late September, Mr. Schiff portrayed “the essence” of the real call by pretending the president was a mobster shaking someone down. The president has said Mr. Schiff “illegally made up” the call, and has attacked him on Twitter, calling him “Shifty Schiff.”
On the Senate floor on Friday evening, Mr. Schiff used the attacks on him as an example of what he called “distractions” that senators should expect from the president’s lawyers when they open their defense case on Saturday morning. He urged them to ignore such attacks and focus on what he said was proven misconduct by Mr. Trump.
About his parody of the president, he said: “I discovered something very significant by mocking the president, and that is for a man who loves to mock others, he does not like to be mocked. It turns out he’s got a pretty thin skin. Who would have thought?”
In his closing remarks, Representative Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, outlined a dire warning: that a failure to reprove President Trump for obstructing Congress would inflict “an unending injury to this country” because “the balance of power that our founders set out will never be the same.”
Casting Mr. Trump as a continuing threat to the Constitution, Mr. Schiff implored senators not to set a precedent that would cede Congress’s investigative authority to the executive branch for generations to come.
“If we are to decide here, that a president of the United States can simply say, ‘Under Article 2, I can do whatever I want and I don’t have to treat a coequal branch of government like it exists, I don’t have to give it any more than the back of my hand,’” Mr. Schiff said, “that will be an unending injury to this country.”
As they wrap up their case, House managers have one final task: Prove that President Trump is a future threat, not just a past one.
Representative Jason Crow of Colorado made that case Friday evening, telling senators that the goal of impeachment was to “protect against future presidential misconduct that would endanger democracy and the rule of law.”
Mr. Trump, he said, is a continuing threat in three ways. He accused Mr. Trump of continuing to assert that he is immune from investigation. He said the president’s conduct with regard to Ukraine was part of a “pattern of soliciting foreign interference” that would continue. And he said Mr. Trump’s obstruction of Congress was “a constitutional crime in progress.”
The message is meant for senators as they decide on two articles of impeachment. But more broadly, warning that Mr. Trump continues to be a threat is a political message for the public, an attempt to justify to the voters their focus on Mr. Trump’s actions in the past.
Inside the chamber, the House managers are virtually certain to fail in convincing Republicans that Mr. Trump is a persistent threat who should be ousted from office. But the broader political task is more of an open question — one that will most likely not be decided until the 2020 election this year.
As the hearing was underway, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got into it with a reporter for NPR, Mary Louise Kelly, after she asked about his failure to stand up for the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch. Ms. Kelly reported that Mr. Pompeo shouted at her, using an expletive and demanding, “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”
“He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map. I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked,” she said. “I pointed to Ukraine. He put the map away. He said people will hear about this.”
Mr. Pompeo is scheduled to go to Kiev next week to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The encounter recalls a conversation last year between two witnesses in the impeachment inquiry: David Holmes, a top American Embassy aide in Kiev, and Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union. Mr. Holmes testified that Mr. Sondland told him that President Trump didn’t give a whit about Ukraine.
After hearing a closing argument from Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, in which he implored the Senate to “put America first,” senators are now taking a 30-minute dinner break. When they return, the Democratic impeachment managers will conclude their opening arguments.
In a broadside against President Trump’s pledge to stonewall “all the subpoenas” that Congress issued his administration, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called Mr. Trump “the first and only president ever to declare himself unaccountable.”
“This is a determination by President Trump that he wants to be all powerful,” Mr. Nadler said on Friday. “He does not have to respect the Congress. He does not have to respect the representatives of the people. Only his will goes.”
Mr. Nadler concluded: “He is a dictator. This must not stand and that is another reason why he must be removed from office.”
In some of his most confrontational comments yet, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, laid out President Trump’s refusal to accept the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that Russia, not Ukraine, interfered in the 2016 presidential elections as a betrayal of the nation’s foreign policy.
“I don’t know if there’s ever been a greater success of Russian intelligence,” Mr. Schiff said. “Whatever profile Russia did of our president, boy, did they have him spot on.”
Mr. Schiff said that the president’s defense of Russia in 2018, as he stood in Helsinki, Finland, next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, amounted to “one hell of a Russian intelligence coup.”
“I hope it was worth it for the president,” Mr. Schiff concluded, “because it certainly wasn’t worth it for the United States.”
In arguing that President Trump obstructed Congress, Representative Zoe Lofgren zeroed in on the failure of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with one his top advisers, T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, to answer subpoenas.
Both are believed to have firsthand knowledge of the Ukraine affair. But neither was on Senator Chuck Schumer’s wish list for Senate witnesses. That is apparently because the Democrats believed Republicans would be more likely to agree to a short list of the former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, and three other witnesses. But Mr. Pompeo is arguably as important as Mr. Bolton.
The American ambassador to the European Union, Gordon D. Sondland, testified that Mr. Pompeo was “in the loop” on the pressure campaign, and other witnesses reported interactions with Mr. Brechbuhl on key issues.
Democrats have focused more heavily on Mr. Bolton for two reasons: He has said he is willing to testify and they believe he will be critical of Mr. Trump.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an impeachment manager during the Clinton trial, offered advice to both legal teams during the most recent break in the proceedings. He suggested that the president’s team should emphasize that Mr. Trump had “no corrupt purpose” and that the impeachment managers should “use the words of the other side, as they used my words — I’m fair game — talking about how they viewed executive privilege when it was a Democratic president.”
“And I wouldn’t take all 24 hours,” he added.
As he fielded questions, Jay Sekulow, a member of the president’s defense team, was behind him, waiting for a turn to speak to the cameras.
The State Department on Friday afternoon missed another deadline to provide documents requested by Congress, as Democratic impeachment managers accused President Trump of obstructing Congress by stonewalling documents and trying to intimidate witnesses.
Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, had asked the department to provide records that he said suggested the agency was aware of threats to the security of Marie L. Yovanovitch. Her abrupt dismissal as the American envoy to Ukraine is at the heart of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on the country.
“I have serious concerns that the security of an American ambassador and an American embassy were compromised,” Mr. Engel said in a statement. “When she was called in the middle of the night and told to get on the next plane out of Ukraine, Ambassador Yovanovitch was warned, ‘this is about your security.’”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told reporters his brief but notable absence on Thursday in the chamber was because of illness.
A day earlier, Democratic impeachment managers played a video clip of him from 1999 contradicting a key argument in the president’s legal defense, but he was not at his desk or indeed in the chamber at all.
Mr. Graham said he had been feeling under the weather and told reporters that if he knew the Democratic impeachment managers were going to play a video of him, he would have stayed to watch: “Nobody likes watching me more than me.”
In spite of rules that require them to sit quietly at their desks for the duration of the impeachment trial, senators have struggled with restlessness and have begun increasingly wandering around the chamber and, like Mr. Graham, even leaving altogether for fifteen to twenty minute breaks to check their phones and grab snacks.
Hours after a recording emerged of President Trump apparently ordering the removal of the American envoy to Ukraine, Democratic impeachment managers, laying out their case that Mr. Trump obstructed Congress, sought to weaponize all the evidence still being withheld from lawmakers.
The argument appeared to be aimed not only at the public, but also at Republican senators who have signaled they are open to support a Democratic-led measure that would introduce new witnesses and documents to the trial.
“This evidence will come to light,” Representative Val B. Demings of Florida said, ticking off a list of documents the White House refused to release to House investigators. “We shouldn’t have to wait for a book.”
Democrats don’t usually hold up President Richard M. Nixon as a paragon of transparency. Yet in making their case on Friday that President Trump was unprecedented in his obstruction of Congress, they did just that.
Quoting Nixon’s direction to his administration during Watergate, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, a House manager, read to senators: “All members of the White House staff will appear voluntarily when requested by the committee, they will testify under oath, and they will answer fully all proper questions.”
Ms. Lofgren, who worked as a young lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, seemed to relish comparing Nixon’s quotation with what Mr. Trump’s lawyers said in a letter in October about the current impeachment inquiry.
“In the letter to the speaker of the House, the White House counsel said that President Trump, quote, cannot permit his administration to participate,” Ms. Lofgren said. “No president has ever used the official power of his office to prevent witnesses from giving testimony to Congress in such a blanket and indiscriminate manner.”
Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters this morning that he wants someone “like Mueller” to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden and their activity in Ukraine years ago, a reference to Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel who examined Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The comment, which he repeated this afternoon, was a significant pivot from a position he took on Thursday, when he said he would resist pressure from Republicans to call the Bidens as witnesses during the trial, a move he said would not serve the Senate well.
He also disputed the assertion from House managers that Hunter Biden’s involvement in Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, had been investigated.
The managers had raised this as part of their argument that President Trump’s insistence that Ukraine investigation Mr. Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a possible presidential opponent, was unwarranted.
“They could have called people in the House, close to the president, they chose not to, and they’re dumping this in our lap,” Mr. Graham said. “They should have looked more at what happened with the Bidens, they chose not to.”
The administration, at the direction of the White House, stonewalled 71 requests for documents by House investigators. Some witnesses were able to rely on their own personal notes and records to construct their testimony. But reams of documents have not been turned over or made public.
President Trump’s strategy was an extension of his response to the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump refused to answer questions in person, and in written answers, he said dozens of times that he could not recall events. When prosecutors complained the responses were inadequate, they were rebuffed.
The House managers accuse Mr. Trump of unprecedented obstruction of justice in withholding documents and blocking the testimony of top aides.
Representative Val B. Demings, a Florida Democrat known for her plainspoken style, told the senators that they should not wait and hope the records might dribble out in the future. “You should be hearing this evidence now,” she said.
Last year, as the Trump administration battled House Democrats in court over information for oversight investigations, the Justice Department said that such matters were a “purely political dispute” and that the House lacked standing to ask the judicial branch to enforce its subpoenas.
But in the Senate impeachment trial, Mr. Trump’s legal team has seemingly taken the opposite position. Led by Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, and his private lawyer, Jay Sekulow, the defense team argued that the Senate ought not subpoena witnesses and documents because the House ought to have pursued that information in court for itself before deciding to impeach Mr. Trump.
On Thursday, the top lawyer for the House of Representatives, Douglas Letter, sent a pair of letters to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia notifying it of the inconsistent legal positions, and urging swift rulings for the House.
“In light of President Trump’s argument, it is not clear whether D.O.J. still maintains its position that courts are barred from considering subpoena-enforcement suits brought by the House,” Mr. Letter wrote, adding: “The executive branch cannot have it both ways.”
The appeals court is weighing two cases won by the House at the district-court level. One seeks access to grand-jury evidence gathered by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, during the Russia investigation. The other seeks testimony from Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, who was a witness to several episodes in which the president sought to impede that investigation.
Jay Sekulow, a member of President Trump’s legal team, said during a break in the impeachment trial on Friday that the defense would present a brief overview of its case on Saturday, comparing it to a movie trailer.
“I guess I would call it a trailer, coming attractions — that would be the best way to say it,” Mr. Sekulow said, adding that the Senate had asked the president’s lawyers to limit their presentation on Saturday to no more than three hours, starting at 10 a.m.
“We have three hours to put it out, so we’ll take whatever time is appropriate during that three hours to kind of lay out what the case will look like,” he said. “But next week is when you see the full presentation.”
Mr. Sekulow also previewed the aggressive and confrontational approach the White House lawyers intend to take when it is their turn. He railed against Representative Adam B. Schiff, the lead House manager, for saying that foreign interference in an election was deplorable.
“I wonder if he thought that about the fact that the Clinton campaign had sought — it’s completely cooperated, it’s uncontested — the Steele dossier, who was utilizing both supposedly assets that a former British spy had in Russia to get information on the president,” Mr. Sekulow told reporters, referring to an intelligence report on contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.
“Was that not foreign interference? Was that not an attempt for foreign interference?” he asked. “So you could get on your horse and act haughty and proud about it. But you know what, let’s look at what the evidence says.”
Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to President Trump, seizing on impeachment managers’ references to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, took the opportunity on Friday to criticize Mr. Biden, one of Mr. Trump’s political rivals, as well as Congress.
“If anybody should be interested in investigating corruption in Ukraine, it’s probably the members of Congress who are wasting their time investigating the president instead and have just whistled right past” the younger Biden’s work at a Ukrainian energy company, Ms. Conway told reporters at the White House briefing room.
She added, “His father has no energy, but Hunter Biden has no energy experience.”
Her comments are part of a defense mounted by Republicans that argues Mr. Trump’s interest in investigating Mr. Biden’s work in Ukraine was reasonable.
Ms. Conway, who also referred on Friday to the elder Mr. Biden as the president’s “spooky political opponent,” and began a broadside against his campaign, has previously been found by an independent government agency to have repeatedly violated an ethics law preventing federal employees from engaging in campaign politics while at work. The White House rejected that agency’s conclusion as “unfair and unsupported.”
Delving deeper into impeachment managers’ argument that President Trump’s transgressions are evidence of a president who places his own self-interest above the country’s, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, invoked the abrupt dismissal of Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former envoy to Ukraine, an event Democrats say was at the heart of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign.
“Do you think for a moment that any of you, no matter what your relationship with this president, no matter how close you are to this president,” Mr. Schiff asked. “Do you think for a moment he felt it was in his interest, do you think for a moment he wouldn’t ask for you to be investigated?”
Mr. Schiff’s comments came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to respond to questions about the ire that his refusal to defend Ms. Yovanovitch had prompted among career diplomats at the State Department. In response to questions from the NPR host Mary Louise Kelly, Mr. Pompeo insisted that he had “defended every State Department official.”
But he demurred when Ms. Kelly pressed him to point out one instance in which he defended Ms. Yovanovitch. “I’ve said all I’m going to say today, thank you,” he said.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, drew attention when she expressed caution about a drawn-out court battle over executive privilege — noting that the House skipped that ordeal. But there is one witness for whom that fear likely does not apply: John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.
During the House inquiry, Mr. Bolton made clear he would refuse to testify unless a judge ordered him to. This month, however, Mr. Bolton said he would testify if subpoenaed by the Senate, without any judicial ruling. The distinction is crucial because executive privilege works more like a shield than a sword.
If officials do not want to comply with subpoenas, the privilege can provide them with legal protection. If Congress tries to enforce its subpoenas by suing them, a legal fight will ensue over whether executive privilege trumps the subpoenas.
But the situation is very different for former officials who choose to comply with subpoenas, defying the president’s objections. Executive privilege has no built-in enforcement mechanism that enables a president to involuntarily gag people.
In theory, the White House could sue Mr. Bolton and seek a temporary restraining order. But there is no precedent for that, and the First Amendment severely limits the ability of the government to suppress speech before its expression.
John McCain, the longtime Republican senator who died in 2018, once warned that President Trump’s unusual relationship to Russia was like a centipede.
“I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop,” he said.
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead impeachment manager for Democrats, apparently shares that view and as he made the case Friday afternoon that Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine had benefited Russia and endangered “our national interest and our national security,” he turned to Mr. McCain to help drive home the point.
He referred to Mr. McCain’s strong advocacy for bipartisan American support of Ukraine as a means to check Russia’s threat. And then he projected a video of the senator into the chamber he served in for three decades.
“Suppose Ukraine, finally, after failing in 2004, gets it right,” Mr. McCain said in the video. “Democracy, gets rid of corruption, economy is really improving and it’s right there on the border with Russia.”
“I think it makes him really nervous if there was a success in Ukraine,” he said of Mr. Putin.
Mr. Schiff using one of their own to press his case may rankle some Republican senators. It could also incite Mr. Trump, who savaged the one-time Republican presidential nominee in life and death.
As the Democratic House managers continued to outline how President Trump and officials in his circle orchestrated and tried to hide his pressure campaign on Ukraine, they ended up name-checking some of the senators now serving as jurors, underscoring the role of several lawmakers when they learned Mr. Trump was withholding the nation’s military aid. It also illustrates the involvement of some senators in the very affair that they are now considering as jurors.
Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, both leaders of the bipartisan Senate Ukraine Caucus, urged Mr. Trump to release the aid. Mr. Johnson traveled to Kyiv to tell the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that he had tried but failed to persuade Mr. Trump to release the aid; Mr. Portman called Mr. Trump and privately lobbied him hours before he eventually released it.
Mr. Johnson, for his part, became visibly animated on Thursday afternoon when an impeachment manager invoked his name, leaving his seat and gesturing emphatically to Mr. Portman. The Ohio Republican responded only briefly, remaining stone-faced.
As House managers began their third full day of arguments on Friday, one thing is clear: They continue to repeat the same set of facts about the Ukraine pressure campaign again and again — this time in service of their argument about the president’s obstruction of Congress.
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead manager, acknowledged this week that some of the case would be repetitive but said it was necessary to put the facts in the proper context.
True to his word, the managers on Friday started by detailing now-familiar moments in the pressure campaign: the July 25 call between Mr. Trump and the president of Ukraine; phone calls with Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union; the hold on security aid; video clips from witnesses in the House inquiry.
For some Republican senators, the familiarity is off-putting.
“You hear it again and again and again. I can almost recite the testimony, which has been roughly the same,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “There’s about two hours of information you heard for the first time. We heard it with all the motions, we heard it with Schiff in the beginning and the end of the day.”
Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, agreed: “That is the big challenge we are having right now is how often we’re hearing the same story. On Tuesday, all day we heard the same stories, the same videos. On Wednesday, all day, the same stories the same video.”
The House impeachment managers are now at work on the heart of their task for the afternoon: stringing together, bit by bit, a story of how President Trump and lawyers around him tried to conceal his Ukraine pressure campaign.
Discussion of Mr. Trump’s alleged cover-up had focused primarily on Mr. Trump’s defiance of subpoenas for testimony and documents in the impeachment inquiry. But Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Jason Crow of Colorado suggested to senators that behavior is just one part of a longer cover-up, much of which took place behind the scenes before the House had even learned of the pressure campaign.
“They were determined to prevent Congress and the American people from learning anything about the president’s corrupt behavior,” Mr. Jeffries said of lawyers at the White House and Justice Department who bottled up reports in July 2019 from White House foreign policy advisers alarmed by the legality of a White House meeting with Ukrainian officials and Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call with the country’s leader.
Mr. Crow said the president’s cover-up intensified after three House Democratic committee chairmen announced in early September that they were investigating the suspension of $391 million in military aid earmarked for Ukraine. Now, White House budget officials rushed to put together a justification for a weeks-old freeze.
“This is where the music stops, and everyone starts running to find a chair,” he said.
Vice President Mike Pence, who is on a trip abroad but has been in close contact with the president to compare notes over the impeachment trial, told reporters on Friday in Rome that he expected a speedy acquittal in the Senate.
“I think you will hear a strong defense of this president and then senators will have a choice to make,” Mr. Pence said. “The outcome here is that the president should be acquitted.”
He also said that he would consider turning over transcripts of his phone conversations with President Volodymyr Zelensky if he received a “reasonable” request from the Senate. Mr. Pence initially said he would turn over those transcripts nearly three months ago, but he said on Friday that he decided to withhold them as the House impeachment inquiry unfolded.
“We’d consider any reasonable request by the Senate, and we will work with White House counsel” on any such request, he said.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, one of the House impeachment managers, focused on the role of John A. Eisenberg, the lead lawyer for the National Security Council.
Three National Security Council staff members reported to Mr. Eisenberg about pressure on Ukraine for investigations of the Bidens. One of those staff members, Fiona Hill, testified that Mr. Eisenberg told her that he was concerned. But because Mr. Trump has blocked his aides from testifying, Mr. Jeffries said, it is unknown whether or how Mr. Eisenberg followed up.
Reporting by The New York Times has shown that Mr. Eisenberg reported the complaints to Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Mr. Cipollone invited him to brief the president.
If that is true, Mr. Cipollone appears to have passed the buck. Mr. Eisenberg reports directly to him, and unlike Mr. Cipollone, he doesn’t typically meet directly with the president.
Ultimately, Mr. Eisenberg did not take Mr. Cipollone’s advice, according to our article here.
A premise of the escalating debate over whether the Senate should vote to call witnesses is that four Republicans would need to support that idea. Along with the 47 members of the Democratic caucus, four Republican senators would create a 51-vote majority.
There’s been little discussion of it, but there’s a musty precedent from the 1868 Andrew Johnson trial whereby, in theory, it could take three Republicans. The catch is that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would have to support the idea, too.
If only three Republicans were to vote for a motion to call witnesses, the Senate would be split 50-50. That means the motion would fail. But twice in the 1868 trial, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, in his role as the presiding officer, cast a tie-breaking vote on a procedural motion — which therefore passed.
Some senators believed Chase lacked the power to break ties, but votes to nullify his intervention failed, creating a precedent. To be sure, both of those votes were far less momentous than a motion to call witnesses in President Trump’s trial: They involved whether the Senate should take a short break and adjourn for the day, respectively.
In the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, Chief Justice William Rehnquist did not cast any tie-breaking votes.
During debate on Tuesday on the impeachment trial rules, Republican senators blocked a bid by Democrats to leave it up to Chief Justice Roberts to decide whether evidence or testimony was relevant and should be allowed.
President Trump’s legal team plans to make a brief appearance on Saturday, using only a few hours to begin to lay out its case on a day when few people are watching, according to people briefed on the plan.
Both Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, will appear. Each will speak for about an hour, although officials said the planning was still fluid.
On Monday, Mr. Trump will get his made-for-television presentation.
That day, another person helping the team, Alan Dershowitz, the veteran defense lawyer, will make a short presentation arguing that the accusations against the president are not impeachable offenses. Mr. Dershowitz, who frequently appears as a television commentator, has rejected the articles against Mr. Trump in his remarks.
As they circle around a now familiar set of facts and their time grows shorter, the Democratic House managers are turning a greater part of their attention to pre-emptively rebut what they expect will be the White House’s arguments.
That’s because they may not have much chance to do so later. Under the rules of the trial, the White House defense will be followed by a short debate on witnesses and documents, with perhaps a chance for short closing statements.
So on Friday, Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and one of the managers, said the following: “Now since we won’t have an opportunity to respond to the president’s presentation, I want to take a minute to respond to some of the arguments that I expect them to make.”
One of those, he said, was the argument repeatedly made by President Trump and his Republican allies: that the pressure campaign claimed by Democrats must not be true because the security aid for Ukraine was eventually delivered without an announcement of investigations that Mr. Trump had repeatedly sought.
That argument is sure to feature prominently in the White House defense, so early on Friday afternoon, Mr. Crow set out to challenge it before it is even made.
“Regardless of whether the aid was ultimately released, the fact that the hold became public sent a very important signal to Russia that our support was wavering,” he said. “The damage was done.”
He went on to warn senators about the tactics he expected the president’s lawyers to use when they begin their arguments on Saturday.
“You will notice I’m sure that they will ignore significant portions of the evidence will try and cherry pick individual statements here and there to manufacture defenses,” Mr. Crow said. “But don’t be fooled.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff’s closing speech Thursday night was drawing acclaim from Democrats for its rousing delivery and pointed depiction of President Trump as untrustworthy and selfish.
But it fell flat with some of its intended audience — Senate Republicans. Multiple senators said they found the remarks offensive and off-putting.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican, ticked off positive economic indicators from the Trump era and said the president’s record should be decided by the voters, not politicians.
“What we heard from Democrats is they don’t trust the voters,” he said.
Mr. Barrasso also made the point that Democrats were not only trying to oust the president, but also trying to keep his name off the ballot in November — a claim that left some puzzled.
But the Senate could take such a step if it convicted the president. A little-known aspect of impeachment would allow the Senate to take a second vote to disqualify Mr. Trump from holding office again. And unlike the 67-vote threshold for removal, the disqualification clause requires only a majority vote.
A recording of President Trump saying “take her out,” in an apparent reference to the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, has emerged, ABC News reported on Friday.
According to ABC News, the recording dates to spring 2018, when Mr. Trump and two associates of his private lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani were dining at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
“Get rid of her,” says the voice that appears to be Mr. Trump, according to the ABC report. “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”
One of the associates at the dinner, Lev Parnas, who is under federal indictment, said in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Mr. Trump ordered Ms. Yovanovitch removed at the dinner. ABC did not air the recording, but it said it had reviewed it.
A new voice recording of Mr. Trump like this could generate more calls from Democrats for additional witnesses to be called in the impeachment trial and for new evidence to be sought. The Senate appears likely to consider next week whether to call more witnesses, with nearly all Republicans opposed. The Senate has long been expected to acquit Mr. Trump.
House Democrats will rest their case on Friday and, despite bipartisan praise for their presentation, it does not appear to have accomplished its chief objective of persuading enough Republicans that they need to hear from live witnesses and see withheld documents.
Both Republicans and Democrats said that the seven Democratic impeachment managers had done a commendable job, singling out Representative Adam B. Schiff, the lead prosecutor, in particular. But even Democrats were not optimistic there had been a breakthrough.
“Mr. Schiff was phenomenal,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, “but I’m skeptical he moved any votes.”
Many Republicans simply said they had heard enough — and heard it over and over.
“It became mind-numbing after a while,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.”
“We have heard plenty,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican.
Those two would never have voted for witnesses in any regard. And the jury is still out on whether the other senators considered in play — Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee — would join with Democrats.
But the increasing expectation in the Senate on Friday was that a vote sometime next week to call witnesses would fall short, moving the trial into its end game.
President Trump’s White House lawyers will begin their defense of the president at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, announced at the start of proceedings Friday afternoon.
The early start will give the White House legal team more time to begin making its case on Saturday, though it is not clear whether that will happen. Mr. McConnell said only that he expected the proceeding to go “for several hours” on Saturday. And Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lawyers, has been cagey about how many hours his team would use to defend Mr. Trump.
One thing is clear: The president would prefer his defense be presented during the week, when more people are watching. In an early morning tweet, Mr. Trump said Saturdays are “Death Valley” for television.
With President Trump’s acquittal all but certain, Republican leaders have narrowed their focus to one overriding strategic goal: ensuring that the Senate does not vote in favor of calling new witnesses or allowing in evidence that could prolong the impeachment trial and scramble the ultimate outcome.
In the hallways of the Capitol, Republican senators were trying out at least a half dozen arguments, all of them apparently aimed at a handful of fellow Republicans who have expressed openness to gathering additional evidence. Here’s a look at some of their most common refrains:
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A vote for witnesses would surely result in a protracted legal fight to secure testimony, prolonging the trial and paralyzing the government indefinitely.
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Calling witnesses now would reward the House for rushing its case.
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The House impeachment managers have claimed to have all the evidence they need to prove Mr. Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, so why bother with more information?
“The number of times they have made it very clear that they have clear and convincing evidence and that the evidence is all clear and convincing,” said Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota. “Time and time again, they have told us how much they’ve gotten.”
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A fight over access to witnesses could force the courts to settle tricky questions about the scope of the president’s executive privilege, which could result in rulings that could weaken the presidency.
“I don’t want to call John Bolton because they could have chosen to call him and they refused to,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. He was referring to House Democrats, who did not subpoena Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser after it became clear he would refuse to appear. “I’m not going to destroy executive privilege, I’m not going to let the House put me in this box,” Mr. Graham added.
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Be careful what you wish for.
Some Republicans are playing hardball, threatening to call witnesses pleasing to Mr. Trump, like Hunter Biden or the anonymous whistle-blower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry, that could turn the trial into a circus. The idea, in part, is to send a warning to moderate Republican senators who have signaled they might be open to witnesses that they should not go down that path.
Complaining they were tired of listening to the Democratic impeachment managers repeat the same arguments day after day, and piqued by closing remarks made by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Republican senators close to President Trump began urging his defense team to mount a vigorous rebuttal focused on the substance of Democrats’ case, not just the process.
Seizing on the House managers’ decision to talk at length about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called on the White House defense team to “make a compelling case that there is something, based on good government and foreign policy, to look at here.”
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said in an interview that he would encourage the president’s lawyers “to clarify some of these videos” of witness testimony “that have been played that are clipped in ways that don’t really tell the whole story.”
“This will be the first time that the president’s story will be able to be told,” Mr. Barrasso said.
Senator Lamar Alexander, one of four Republicans who have signaled an openness to calling witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial, said on Friday that he wouldn’t make up his mind on the matter until after senators had had a chance to question House Democratic impeachment managers and the president’s team.
The Democratic prosecutors are scheduled to complete their oral arguments against Mr. Trump on Friday, and the president’s lawyers are slated to begin up to 24 hours of his defense as early as Saturday. Under trial rules adopted this week, those presentations will be followed by a question-and-answer period for senators.
“After all of that, I think the question is, do we need more evidence,” Mr. Alexander said on his way into a briefing on Capitol Hill. “Do we need to hear witnesses? Do we need more documents? And I think that question can only be answered then.”
Mr. Alexander, who is retiring from the Senate, is regarded as a potential defector on the question of witnesses who might feel compelled by his reverence for the institution to press for a more thorough airing of evidence in the impeachment trial.
But on Friday, he suggested he may have heard as much as he needs to.
“As the House managers have said many times, they’ve presented us with a mountain of overwhelming evidence, so we have a lot to consider already,” Mr. Alexander told reporters.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine next week during a trip to Ukraine and four other countries in Europe and Central Asia,the State Department said on Friday. It will be the first meeting between a member of President Trump’s cabinet and Mr. Zelensky since the impeachment inquiry against Mr. Trump began in the fall.
Mr. Pompeo has twice canceled planned trips to Ukraine in recent months. The first trip had been planned for November, when American officials were testifying in the House about the Ukraine affair, and the second had been intended for this month. When Mr. Pompeo canceled that trip on Jan. 1, the State Department said that he was staying in Washington because of anti-American protests at the embassy in Baghdad. During that period, Mr. Trump, Mr. Pompeo and other top officials were planning a drone strike on Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful general.
The State Department said Mr. Pompeo planned to arrive in Kyiv on Thursday, where he would seek “to highlight U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” It said he also planned to take part in a wreath-laying ceremony “to honor those who have fallen” in Donbass, where the Ukrainian military is fighting a yearslong insurgency that is supported by Russia. The American military aid at the center of the impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump is intended to bolster the Ukrainians in that war and to help deter Russian aggression.
As discussion of possible witnesses heats up in the Capitol, there continues to be a widespread misconception about whom precisely Democrats most want to hear from at President Trump’s trial.
While much of the news media is focused on John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Senate Democrats and the House impeachment managers privately say they are more interested in Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff.
Their reasons are pretty simple, but have been obscured somewhat since Mr. Bolton volunteered this month that he would be willing to testify at the trial. Unlike Mr. Bolton, whom witness testimony suggests watched with alarm as the pressure campaign on Ukraine unfolded, Mr. Mulvaney appears to have been intimately involved at every step.
“All of the testimony seems clear that this entire thing was run through Mulvaney,” said Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “Mulvaney was the one talking to Trump on a regular basis.”
Speaking to reporters Friday morning, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called Mr. Mulvaney “the chief cook and bottle washer in this whole evil scheme.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff, the former federal prosecutor who has steered the House impeachment investigation into President Trump, secured his place as a liberal rock star — and villain to conservatives — with the fiery closing argument he delivered Thursday night, imploring senators to convict and remove Mr. Trump because “you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country.”
By Friday morning, the phrase #RightMatters — from the last line of Mr. Schiff’s speech — was trending as a hashtag on Twitter, which was lighting up with reaction from across the philosophical spectrum. “I am in tears,” wrote Debra Messing, the “Will & Grace” actress and outspoken Trump critic. “Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”
Even some Republicans are giving Mr. Schiff, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, grudging respect for delivering a masterful performance. But they also view him as nothing more than a shrewd political operator, and say that his words made clear that for Democrats, impeachment is about undoing the results of the 2016 election — and preventing the president from winning in 2020.
“Adam Schiff is already disputing the results of the 2020 election. Impeachment 2.0?” wrote Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee.
Mr. Schiff is known on Capitol Hill for his serious demeanor and dry laconic wit. But on Thursday, he was filled with passion, his voice rising and his face reddening as he made a late-night appeal to a tired and bitterly divided audience of senators, which he was promoting with a video clip on his own Twitter feed on Friday.
“You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country — you can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump,” he said, adding, “This is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Right matters and the truth matters. Otherwise we are lost.”
Friday is the moment of truth for House managers in the Senate impeachment trial as they seek to convince a handful of Republican lawmakers to support their demand for additional witnesses and documentary evidence. So far, there is little apparent evidence that they will succeed.
On Thursday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, declined to say he was optimistic but said he still had “hope.”
Democrats have accused Republicans of abetting a cover-up by Mr. Trump by refusing to subpoena documents that the Trump administration did not hand over during their inquiry and by refusing to demand testimony from additional witnesses like John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff.
In their third day presenting their case, the managers will focus on the second article of impeachment, in which they accuse Mr. Trump of obstructing Congress by blocking witnesses and documents from being provided to the House impeachment inquiry.
For Democrats, that argument — which is expected to once again take the Senate trial late into the evening — could be the ideal backdrop to pressure potentially wavering Republicans who might be willing to break from their party to support the Democratic demands for witnesses.
But the potential targets, a handful of Republican senators, are staying quiet for now. They include Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump’s White House lawyers will take over for up to three days as they present their defense. Both sides will get an additional two hours to sum up their argument on the issue of witnesses and documents sometime next week. But for the House managers, Friday’s presentation may be their last, best hope.
Democrats, looking ahead to President Trump’s State of the Union address, announced on Friday that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan will deliver the Democrats’ response to the president’s speech, scheduled for Feb. 4 — even though his impeachment trial may still be underway.
Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, who made history as one of the first two Latinas from that state to serve in Congress, will deliver the Spanish-language response to the speech, according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, who issued a joint statement about the selections.
The two praised Governor Whitmer, a lawyer, educator and former prosecutor, as a get-things-done type of leader, “whether it’s pledging to ‘Fix the Damn Roads’ or investing in climate solutions,” as Mr. Schumer said.
The response to the State of the Union is generally reserved for rising stars in the opposition party, offering a chance for the minority to lay out its own agenda, in contrast to the president.
With the impeachment trial set to begin at 1 p.m., senators are attending a bipartisan briefing on coronavirus, with Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, telling reporters he hoped to learn about preventive measures being taken. The virus is spreading and has sickened hundreds, mostly in Asia.
But senators were also stopping to weigh in on impeachment, as reporters, cordoned off behind velvet ropes, shouted questions about witnesses and the length of the Saturday session of the trial.
Republican moderates are in the spotlight on Friday as House managers conclude their oral arguments and senators turn to the question of whether to call witnesses and seek new documents in the impeachment trial. All four of the senators opposed Democratic motions for witnesses and documents at the beginning of the trial, but have said they might be open to switching their stances after opening arguments have been completed.
So far, however, none have committed to do so.
Here are the Republican senators to watch:
Mitt Romney of Utah has not said much since the trial started. But earlier, he indicated he would be open to new witnesses, and said he wants to hear from John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser.
Susan Collins of Maine is usually a swing vote in the Senate. Facing re-election this year, she is facing brutal blowback in her state for voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh for his seat on the Supreme Court. She has strongly suggested that she will ultimately vote to call witnesses. Doing so could help her mend fences with moderate voters she needs to keep her seat.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is an independent voice in the Senate. She was the only Republican to oppose Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation and has indicated she could be open to having the Senate examine additional evidence in the impeachment case.
Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is retiring after a long career in the Senate. He has not given clear answers to whether he might support additional witnesses and is extremely close with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader. But Democrats hope his institutionalist impulses might prompt him to be the fourth vote they need.
There has been additional focus on a fifth senator, Cory Gardner of Colorado. Mr. Gardner is a first-term senator who is facing a tough re-election race this year in a politically competitive state. He will need support from independent voters and even some Democrats to win, but Mr. Garnder has so far been mum on the question of witnesses, and has criticized the impeachment inquiry as a politically motivated exercise.
Even as the Senate geared up for the third day hearing from prosecutors in the impeachment trial, a different kind of political clash was gathering outside the Capitol.
People attending the annual March for Life — and counterprotesters who support abortion rights — were already arriving Friday morning for an event that is expected to feature an address by President Trump, the first time a sitting president has attended.
People wearing “March for Life” sweatshirts crossed the Capitol grounds on the way to the march, along with others sporting red “TRUMP2020” baseball caps. Nearby, a separate group of counter protesters wearing sweatshirts that said “Literally, no one asked you” chanted “We love abortion, abortion is cool!”
The annual event protesting abortion started after the 1973 Rove v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States.
Other Republican presidents have addressed the gathering by video, but none has attended. Mr. Trump tweeted on Tuesday: “See you on “See you on Friday … Big Crowd!” Friday…Big Crowd!”
The cameras in the Senate are government controlled by the Senate staff, and photographs are not allowed — limiting what viewers can see as lawmakers consider the case against President Trump. To get a more complete picture of the proceedings, here are two alternatives.
The Senate chamber may be familiar to viewers of C-SPAN, but the room has undergone some significant changes to accommodate the proceedings.
President Trump complained Friday that his lawyers would begin his defense on Saturday, a day the president said in the world of television was “called Death Valley,” as he unleashed dozens of tweets and retweets attacking the Senate trial.
The president began his social media assault just after 6 a.m. by retweeting Greg Jarrett, a conservative Fox News analyst, who was attacking the Democrats’ case. In one post, Mr. Jarrett accused Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead House manager, of lying about the evidence.
Over the next several hours, he retweeted articles by breitbart.com; Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business Network host; Ben Ferguson, a conservative commentator; Dan Bongino, the host of a conservative radio talk show; and several Republican lawmakers, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader in the House.
Later in the morning, Mr. Trump started tweeting his own attacks on the impeachment trial. In addition to complaining about the expected weekend start for his lawyers, Mr. Trump said he had “to endure hour after hour of lies, fraud and deception by Shifty Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer and their crew.”
The House managers prosecuting the case against President Trump will wrap up their arguments on Friday with a focus on the second article of impeachment: the accusation that the president obstructed Congress by blocking witnesses and documents in an attempt to cover up his misconduct.
It will be their last opportunity to appeal to a handful of moderate Republican senators on the question of seeking additional witnesses and documents before the president’s lawyers take center stage. Debate on that vital question is expected to happen early next week, after the conclusion of the arguments and a period of questions about the case from senators.
In the meantime, the Senate trial has tested the patience of senators, who have sat restlessly in their seats for more than 16 hours over two long days. Despite being admonished that they must remain silent and at attention “upon pain of imprisonment,” some have doodled, traded notes, whispered with their neighbors, or even nodded off.
Mr. Trump’s legal defense team is scheduled to begin their presentation on Saturday, angering the president, who complained on Twitter on Friday morning that “my lawyers will be forced to start on Saturday, which is called Death Valley in T.V.”
There have been discussions in the Capitol that senators could start the Saturday session earlier than the usual 1 p.m., which could give them the chance to leave earlier, especially if the White House lawyers decide to reserve more of their presentation for Monday.