White House Absent as Counsel Makes Case to Impeach Trump

WASHINGTON (CN) – Calling out the White House’s conspicuous absence from a hearing to make the case for impeachment, Representative Jerry Nadler asserted Monday that President Donald Trump may have spurned the proceedings for lack of a defense.

“President Trump chose not to show,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee remarked in his opening statement this morning. “He may not have much to say in his own defense, but he cannot claim that he did not have an opportunity to be heard.”

Referring to evidence that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to initiate political investigations, Nadler said: “To the members of this committee, to the members of the House, and to my fellow citizens, I want to be absolutely clear: the integrity of our next election is at stake.

“Nothing could be more urgent,” he added.

Like other Republican minority leaders, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member Doug Collins used his statement to seek to delegitimize the proceedings as a political effort to overturn the results of an election.

“For anyone to think that this was not a baked deal is not being honest with themselves,” Collins said. “Presumption is now the standard instead of proof.”

After weeks of testimony from fact witnesses and constitutional law professors, attorneys for Democrats and Republicans have been called to make their cases to the U.S. public in the style of opening arguments at a trial.

The Democrats’ attorney Barry Berke simplified the scandal that wrought the impeachment inquiry by opening his remarks through the eyes of a child.

“Dad, does the president have to be a good person?” Berke said his son asked him.

“Like many questions of young children, it had a certain clarity but was hard to answer,” Berke continue.

“I said, ‘Son, it is not a requirement… but that is the hope,’” he continued.

This story is developing…