The President's impeachment legal defense team took a very different tactic that seemed more effective than the repetitive histrionics of the House managers led by Rep. Adam Schiff.
The White House team also displayed quick-cut video presentations on the Senate’s overhead screens, turning soundbites from key players in the impeachment case into fast-snapping clips. It all seemed to command the attention of senators, likely a welcome change of pace for those who had grown tired of the prosecution’s long and often repetitive presentations.
Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow gave his word to the senators, “We’re not going to play the same clips seven times.” That prompted smiles from some senators.
Led by frequent Supreme Court advocate Jay Sekulow and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, the White House laid out their case in just two hours, focusing on the law and facts. Here is a link to their trial memo.
This in contrast to lead House Impeachment Manager Adam Schiff’s continuing to misrepresent the record and tell falsehoods. The Washington Times has a lengthy piece detailing some of Schiff’s "inaccuracies":
Jack Langer, Mr. Nunes’ spokesman, looked back on the Schiff battles and told The Washington Times: “Schiff was not only spectacularly wrong about FISA abuse and about Trump-Russian collusion, he tried to obstruct our investigation of these issues. He encouraged the agencies we oversee not to comply with our document requests, and he denounced our subpoena for Fusion GPS’s bank records that outed the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC as funders of the Steele dossier, which Schiff was touting. The media is already trying to memory hole all of that.” . . . .
Republicans say Mr. Schiff’s most egregious falsehood was at a Sept. 26 House hearing on the release of the Ukraine whistleblower report and a White House transcript of Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Mr. Schiff told the public that Mr. Trump asked Mr. Zelensky to “make up dirt” on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden.
When Republicans reread the transcript and challenged Mr. Schiff, he admitted he had made up the quotes as “parody.”
But later on Twitter, Mr. Schiff claimed his allegation had been confirmed.
Every day new stories come out but the context of the stories is important, as is how they are being used by inaccurate purveyors such as Rep. Adam Schiff. Maybe that is why relatively no one is watching, and, in fact, America prefers watching Jeopardy!:
The conventional wisdom has long been that President Trump makes for great television ratings. But apparently that's only true when he's actually the one on-air. The numbers are in on impeachment, and it's a ratings dud.
Across half a dozen network and cable channels, the second day of the Senate impeachment trial's viewership fell by nearly one-fifth. It drew 8.9 million viewers in total over the course of four prime hours, according to Nielsen.
That's a hair more than the number of people who watched Chicago Fire on NBC that night. It's nearly a million fewer than the average number of viewers that Jeopardy! scored from October through December of last year. (The recent tournament, Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time, accrued an audience nearly 6 million viewers larger than the second day of the Senate trial.)
It sounds like the Senate and the public may be growing tired of Rep. Schiff.