Today, Judge Jackson ordered the government to hand over unredacted communications concerning Trump’s hamfisted pressure campaign against Ukraine.
And lawyers for American Oversight, the Center for Public Integrity and The New York Times may yet hoist Jay Sekulow and the Senate Republicans with their own petard.
Jacqueline Thomsen, law.com, Jan. 23, 2020
That means even more legal fights to challenge the redactions and get that hidden information out in the open. And the public records lawyers are turning to an unexpected source in urging the courts to still rule swiftly in the cases: The arguments made by Trump’s impeachment lawyers.
Lawyers from The New York Times’ legal department, David McCraw and Alexandra Perloff-Giles, quoted Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow in a filing Friday as they seek emails about the Ukrainian military aid exchanged by Office of Management and Budget officials.
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“If the Senate’s decision not to remove President Trump was rooted in the belief that—to quote President Trump’s defense lawyer, Jay Sekulow—upcoming ‘elections, not impeachment’ should be the final arbiter of presidential wrongdoing, it is all the more important that the American public know how the decision to withhold aid to Ukraine was made and acted upon,” attorneys for the newspaper wrote in a Friday filing.
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“Although the Senate acquitted President Trump, the explanations senators have given for their votes suggest that one of the most persuasive arguments made on the president’s behalf—perhaps the winning argument for acquittal—was that the voters, not the Senate, should judge whether the president committed an offense and that they should express their judgment in the November 2020 presidential election,” Center for Public Integrity attorney Peter Smith wrote in a filing earlier this month.
“Therefore it is imperative that the citizenry have information that will shed light on the president’s clear violation of law, including the execution of his illegal directive and efforts by government agencies to justify and explain it,” he continued.