Many Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday to adopt Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments that abuse of power and obstruction of Congress were not impeachable offenses. The argument cut against the legal consensus, and against Mr. Dershowitz’s own earlier views, that impeachable offenses need not be crimes.
“I listened to Ken Starr and Dershowitz loud and clear yesterday,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “The whole premise of the impeachment, I think, is false. I don’t think we need witnesses.”
Punctuating his remarks on Tuesday with a refrain of “danger, danger, danger,” Mr. Sekulow insisted that the managers’ case was built solely on a policy dispute with the president over his push to combat corruption in Ukraine.
“If that becomes the new normal, future presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, even before they can take the oath of office,” Mr. Sekulow said. “The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”
Despite his warnings, Mr. Sekulow did not directly deny Mr. Bolton’s account, instead reading aloud from statements by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department and the vice president’s office contesting it.
Democrats spent three days last week arguing just the opposite. They said that the House’s two-month investigation concluded that Mr. Trump had used the powers of his office not in the pursuit of a policy objective but for his own political advantage. When he was caught, they argued, he sought to conceal what he had done by ordering an across the board defiance of their investigation
Clocking in at under an hour and a half, the bare-bones closing argument from Mr. Trump’s lawyers underscored their confidence in the final outcome. In the end, they used less than half of the 24 hours available to them to present a case to senators.