PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Whatever you think about the Trump impeachment process in Washington, D.C., if you think about it at all, Trump’s lawyers have gone over-board in defending the president.

They are not just advocating for his interests. They are not dealing with the facts of the case.  They are manifestly lying to curry favor from and for their boss, even as they continue to work to fool the public.

The fact is that there is a code of conduct for lawyers and they should be held to account for their falsehoods.

I say this with a background as a registered lobbyist where I – and many others like me – lived within an ethical code, one key element of which was not to lie. If we did, we would pay a penalty, not to mention that our individual credibility would crater.

Here is a summary of what the Trump lawyers want you to believe:

Issue #1: Strip away the name-calling, lies, procedural complaints and conspiracy theories, and you are left with the core of President Trump’s impeachment defense: Everyone does it.

Answer: No they don’t.

As Washington Post columnist Max Boot put it last week, “This premise may be alluring to cynical Trump supporters who are convinced that all politicians are crooks. But it’s simply false. There is no evidence that any president in U.S. history has done what Trump is accused of doing.

“Trump is being impeached because there was no public purpose for his Ukraine policy. It was not in the interest of the United States to hold up military aid to force Ukraine to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden. It was only in the interest of the Trump campaign.”

Issue #2: Lead Trump lawyer Pat Cippolone has maintained that Trump advocates were kept out of House Intelligence Committee hearings.

Answer: False. Many Republicans were in the hearing room, which was supposed to be held behind closed doors – and even those doors were abused by Republicans who entered inappropriately and disrupted the proceedings within eyesight of Republican colleagues inside the room.

Issue #3: Trump’s legal team began its defense last Saturday with a version of one of Trump’s favorite tweets: Read the transcript.

Answer: So, do it. Read the transcript – which is not actually a transcript, but, rather, a summary of the call — and you come to clear conclusion: Trump wanted to make Ukraine complicit in an effort to rig the 2020 election in his favor.

Issue #4: Trump’s lawyers said there was no quid pro quo in his call with the Ukraine president.

Answer: Again, read the transcript and consider the under-oath testimony of Executive Branch officials who listened in on the call. It’s patently obvious that Trump wanted something from Ukraine and would hold funds for Ukraine until he got results – results that benefitted his own election. That’s a quid pro quo.

Issue #5: Trump’s lawyers contended that President Zelensky and high-ranking Ukrainian officials did not know the security assistance was paused until the end of August.

Answer: No. Of course Ukraine was aware of the hold.  A now-former senior Ukrainian official, working in Zelensky’s administration at that point, indicated that she was aware of the hold by late July. Catherine Croft, a State Department official, testified that she was surprised at how quickly her Ukrainian colleagues learned about the hold soon after it was known in the administration.

Issue #6: Trump’s lawyers said there was no issue because, in the end, security assistance flowed without the Ukrainian government announcing any investigations.

Answer: Well, the fact is that the aid was only released after attention had been drawn publicly to the fact that it was being withheld. House Democrats had launched an investigation into the hold. The Washington Post editorial board had explicitly connected the hold to the desired investigations. Trump had already been briefed on a complaint from an anonymous whistleblower in which that connection was mentioned as part of a broad campaign to pressure Ukraine.

The aid was released only after Trump got caught.

Washington Post editor Fred Hiatt made a key point this morning when he wrote this:

“The White House lawyer told senators that, after hearing the facts of the case, you will find that the president did absolutely nothing wrong.

“In other words,” Hiatt added, “to side with the president and allow Americans their choice this November, senators must endorse the preposterous — and also threatening-to-democracy — notion that the president’s behavior is entirely acceptable.”

It’s not. And, what’s more, Trump’s lawyers want us to wait until the 2020 election to do anything about the deception. So, we wait until an election Trump already has tainted and no doubt will continue to taint because, in the end, all that matters is his own interests.

And, as a narcissist, he believes his own interests and country’s interests are identical. No.