LIVE: Bipartisan group of senators takes aim at Rudy Giuliani as Trump's bag man in Ukraine

• On Thursday, the Senate will wrap up a 16-hour period of submitting written questions to prosecutors and defense lawyers in President Donald Trump's impeachment trial.
• Democrats focused their questions on the need to call more witnesses in Trump's trial, particularly the former national security adviser John Bolton. Republicans focused on trying to exonerate the president of wrongdoing and arguing against calling more witnesses.
• All eyes are on a few Republican senators who could be swing votes in the motion to call witnesses: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah.
• Scroll down to watch the trial and follow Insider's live coverage.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On Thursday, senators will wrap up a 16-hour period of submitting written questions to the prosecution and the defense in President Donald Trump's impeachment trial.

The question-and-answer period comes after six marathon days of opening arguments from House impeachment managers — who act as prosecutors in the president's trial — and Trump's defense team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump's personal defense attorney Jay Sekulow. 

After the defense rested its case on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the 16-hour question period would be spread out over two days, and encouraged Senators to keep their questions "thoughtful" and "brief."

The House of Representatives impeached Trump last month for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Both charges related to his efforts to coerce Ukraine into launching politically motivated investigations targeting former Vice President Joe Biden, a 2020 Democratic frontrunner, his son Hunter, and the Democratic Party as a whole.

While doing so, the president withheld $391 million in vital military aid to Ukraine, as well as a White House meeting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately sought and still hasn't gotten. 

During the first day of the question-and-answer, senators quizzed prosecutors and defense lawyers about the merits of impeaching Trump and whether there was a basis for his removal from office.

Democratic senators focused on the unprecedented nature of a Senate impeachment trial with no witnesses and asked House managers to highlight the charges against the president. They zeroed in on the fact that Trump was not interested in corruption in Ukraine before Biden started running for office, and on the fact that over a dozen witnesses have so far testified to the president's misconduct.

Republicans, meanwhile, focused on drawing hypothetical scenarios to try and prove that Biden inappropriately intervened in an investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas company whose board employed Biden's son, Hunter, until last year. (There is no evidence to support the theory that the vice president improperly tried to influence the investigation.)

Some Republican senators also tried to use their questions to reveal the identity of the whistleblower who sparked the impeachment inquiry. But Chief Justice John Roberts, who reviewed the questions beforehand, made it clear that he would not read aloud any question that named the individual who filed the whistleblower complaint against the president.

On Thursday, Democratic senators will likely use their time to help House managers make a compelling case to call John Bolton, the former national security adviser, to testify in the trial. Republicans will likely use their time to try to exonerate the president and argue that the Senate doesn't need to call more witnesses because Congress has all the evidence it needs.

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Bipartisan group of senators takes aim at Rudy Giuliani's role as Trump's bag man in Ukraine

A bipartisan group of senators — Democratic Sens. Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, and Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins — asked a question to Trump's defense team that appeared to take aim at the president's decision to have his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, carry out his pressure campaign in Ukraine.

Here's the question: The Logan Act bars any US citizen without the authority of the US from communicating with any foreign government to influence that government's conduct in relation to any controversy with the US. "Will the president assure the public that private citizens will not be directed to conduct" US policy "unless they've been specifically designated" by the president and State Department to do so?

Here's the Trump team's response: Deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin acknowledged that the question was made in reference to Giuliani but went on to say he wanted to "make clear" that no private person was carrying out foreign policy in the Trump administration.

He pointed to testimony from Kurt Volker, the US's former special envoy to Ukraine, in which Volker said he believed Giuliani was merely a "source of information" for the president, and "someone who knew about Ukraine and someone who spoke to the president."

Philbin also pointed out that the Ukrainians approached Giuliani as a nexus to Trump because "he was someone who could provide information to the president."

He added that Volker testified he did not believe Giuliani was carrying out Trump's policy directives but rather "indicating his views" of what he thought "would be useful" for the Ukrainians to use to convince Trump of their "anti-corruption bona fides."

Regardless, Philbin said, Trump's policy is to "always abide by the laws."

Fact check: It is not true that Giuliani was merely a "source of information" for Trump vis-a-vis Ukraine. More than a dozen witnesses have testified that Giuliani spearheaded the Trump administration's "irregular" foreign policy channel in Ukraine and was instrumental in engineering the ouster of Marie Yovanovitch, the US's ambassador to Ukraine, after he and Trump carried out a smear campaign against her.

Trump's impeachment trial by the numbers (so far)

In response to a question from a group of five Republican senators, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, asking how many witnesses have testified in Trump's impeachment trial and how much documentary evidence has been submitted into the record, deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin laid out a few statistics:

• The Senate has seen 192 video clips from 13 witnesses.
• Over 28,000 pages of documents — specifically, 28,578 pages — have been submitted into the record.
• Each side had up to 24 hours to make opening arguments. House impeachment managers used more than 21 hours of their time, while Trump's defense team used significantly less.

Philbin pointed to the numbers and said, "At this point there has been a lot put on here in terms of a trial. You've seen the witnesses in the clips, all of the most relevant parts, you've seen the documents put up in excerpts on the screens."

Trump lawyer Eric Herschmann mentions the border wall as a defense against impeachment

In response to a question from a Republican senator, which asked whether Trump has "the best interest of America and its citizens in mind," defense attorney Eric Herschmann rattled off a list of the president's accomplishments.

He said Trump is only an "immediate, legitimate threat" to Democrats "because the election is only eight months away."

(Fact check: It's nine months away.)

Herschmann went on to praise Trump for:

• Replacing NAFTA with USMCA
• Overseeing the assassinations of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Iran's top military general Qassem Soleimani
• Job creation and a low unemployment rate
• Cutting illegal border crossings down and building 100 miles of the wall along the US's southern border with Mexico

Fact check: It's unclear where Herschmann was going with this, or why the president's defense team was using his impeachment trial to make a political pitch for his reelection. But The New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported that she heard from several Trump advisers who said Herschmann is making a play for Trump's chief of staff.

House impeachment manager Adam Schiff: 'The Constitution is not a suicide pact'

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact," the lead House impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, said after detailing President Trump's repeated efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into pursuing the investigations he wanted. "It does not require us to surrender our common sense. Our common sense, as well as our morality, tells us what the president did was wrong. When a president sacrifices the national security interests of the country, it's not only wrong but it's dangerous. When a president says … he will continue to do it if left in office, it is dangerous. The framers provided a remedy, and we urge you to use it."

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon uses Mike Pompeo's own words against him

Here's what Wyden asked the House managers: "The [US] intelligence community is prohibited from requesting a foreign entity target an American citizen when the intelligence community is itself prohibited from doing so."

He then referenced Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's own words from a 2017 Senate confirmation hearing when he was tapped to head up the CIA. At the time, Pompeo said, "It is not lawful to outsource that which we cannot do."

Wyden's question continued, "So when President Trump asked a foreign country to investigate an American and the US government had not established a legal predicate to do so, how is that not an abuse of power?"

Here's what Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the lead impeachment manager, said in response: "It is absolutely an abuse of power. And what's more, if you believe that a president can essentially engage in any corrupt activity as long as he believes that it will assist his reelection campaign and that campaign is in the public interest, then what's to stop a president from tasking his intelligence agencies to do political investigations? What's to stop him from tasking the Justice Department? If he can come up with some credible or incredible claim that his opponent deserves to be investigated, their argument would lead you to the conclusion that he has every right to do that."

"But you're absolutely right. If Secretary Pompeo was correct and you can't use your own intelligence agencies, you sure shouldn't be able to use the Russian ones, or the Ukrainian ones."

Pat Cipollone calls impeachment "domestic election interference" even though impeachment is in the Constitution

In response to a question from several Republican Senators as to whether they should reject Trump's impeachment based on its "partisan nature," White House counsel Pat Cipollone mischaracterized the nature of impeachment itself.

Cipollone argued that impeachment in an election year is tantamount to "canceling an election" and "ripping up" Americans' ballots.

The merits of the impeachment case aside, Trump's lawyers have frequently argued throughout the trial that Senators should acquit Trump because removing him would "overturn" a fair election and the will of the voters.

"We've never been in a situation where we have the impeachment of a president in an election year, with the goal of removing the president from office," Cipollone argued. "That is the most massive election interference we've ever witnessed."

Fact check:

• Impeachment is a specific constitutional remedy for removing a president who has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, treason, or bribery.
• Impeachment and conviction do not, in fact, overturn an election or constitute malicious interference. If Trump were removed from office, his Vice President and 2016 running mate Mike Pence would become president, not 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or the third-in-line to the constitution, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Chief Justice John Roberts declines to read aloud a question from a Republican senator from Kentucky

Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the impeachment trial, refused to read aloud a question from a senator from Kentucky.

"The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted," Roberts said.

It's unclear which senator — Rand Paul or Mitch McConnell — submitted the question. But on Wednesday, Roberts refused to read out a question that Paul submitted because it reportedly named the whistleblower who first reported Trump's alleged misconduct toward Ukraine.

Roberts told the Senate this week that he would not read out any questions that tried to out the whistleblower or which contained significant identifying information about the individual, who belongs to the US intelligence community.