Washington: US President Donald Trump's legal team asserted on Monday that he did "absolutely nothing wrong," calling the impeachment case against him "flimsy" and a "dangerous perversion of the Constitution."
The lawyers decried the impeachment process as rigged and insisted that abuse of power was not a crime.
The brief from Trump's lawyers, filed before arguments expected this week in the Senate impeachment trial, offered the most detailed glimpse of the lines of defence they intend to use against Democratic efforts to convict the president and oust him from office over his dealings with Ukraine.
It is meant as a counter to a filing two days ago from House Democrats that summarised weeks of testimony from more than a dozen witnesses in laying out the impeachment case.
The 110-page filing from the White House shifted the tone toward a more legal response.
It still 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 is a constitutional travesty," the lawyers wrote.
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The document said that the two articles of impeachment brought against the president's abuse of power and obstruction of Congress don't amount to impeachment offenses.
It asserted 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 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."
The prosecution team of House managers was expected to spend another day on Capitol Hill preparing for the trial, which will be under heavy security.
Before the filing, House prosecutors arrived on Capitol Hill to tour the Senate chamber.
The impeachment case accuses Trump of abusing power by withholding military aid from Ukraine at the same time that the president was seeking an investigation into Biden, and of obstructing Congress by instructing aides to not participate.
