NY TIMES – President Trump’s legal team will call on the Senate on Monday to “swiftly reject” the impeachment charges and acquit him, maintaining that he committed no impeachable offense and has been the victim of an illegitimate partisan effort to take him down.

In a lengthy brief to be submitted to the Senate the day before his trial begins in earnest, the president’s lawyers plan to make the most sustained argument the White House has advanced since the House opened its impeachment inquiry last fall, contending that the two articles of impeachment approved largely along party lines were constitutionally flawed and set a dangerous precedent.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to dismiss the largely party-line impeachment by the House as a “brazenly political act” following a “rigged process” that should be repudiated by the Senate, according to a person working with his legal team, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the submission of the trial brief. They will argue that neither of the articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump are valid because they do not state a violation of the law and they would in effect try to punish the president for foreign policy decisions and efforts to preserve executive prerogatives.

President Donald Trump’s legal team asserted Monday that he did “absolutely nothing wrong,” calling the impeachment case against him “flimsy” and a “dangerous perversion of the Constitution.”

The 110-page filing from the White House shifted the tone toward a more legal response. Still, it hinged on Trump’s assertion he did nothing wrong and did not commit a crime — even though impeachment does not depend on a material violation of law but rather on the more vague definition of “other high crimes and misdemeanors” as established in the Constitution.

It says the two articles of impeachment brought against the president — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — don’t amount to impeachment offenses. It asserts that the impeachment inquiry centered on Trump’s request that Ukraine’s president open an investigation into Democratic rival Joe Biden was never about finding the truth.

“Instead, House Democrats were determined from the outset to find some way — any way — to corrupt the extraordinary power of impeachment for use as a political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 election and to interfere in the 2020 election,” Trump’s legal team wrote. “All of that is a dangerous perversion of the Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn.”