WASHINGTON (AP) — In a whirlwind defense, Donald Trump’s impeachment attorneys aired a litany of grievances Friday, arguing the former president bore no responsibility for the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol while accusing Democrats of “hatred” and “hypocrisy.”
The defense team, which wrapped up its arguments in just over three hours, said Trump was engaged in “constitutionally protected speech” when he spoke at a rally that immediately preceded the violence on Jan. 6 that left five dead.
Echoing themes often heard in conservative media, they called the impeachment trial a “witch hunt” and accused Democrats of elevating a destructive “cancel culture” to the halls of Congress. They also suggested Democrats were hypocrites for impeaching Trump after some had previously voiced support for racial justice marches last summer, some of which turned violent.
“It has become very clear that House Democrats hate Donald Trump,” said Michael van der Veen, a Philadelphia personal injury attorney who is part of Trump’s defense team. “Hatred is at the heart.”
Here are some highlights from Friday’s impeachment proceedings:
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FIRST AMENDMENT
Regardless of what occurred after Trump’s Jan. 6 speech, the former president was simply exercising his First Amendment right to free speech and can’t be found at fault, his attorneys argued.
“The Senate cannot ignore the First Amendment,” said van der Veen.
Nearly 150 constitutional scholars disagree. In a letter signed last week they wrote that “the First Amendment does not apply in impeachment proceedings, so it cannot provide a defense for President Trump.”
The First Amendment has long been invoked as a powerful and compelling defense in court. But impeachment proceedings are an inherently political process that exists outside the U.S. court system in which senators sit as jurors.
Further, just because speech is protected by the Constitution doesn’t mean that there aren’t limits. Threats to commit a crime or “fighting words” that are likely to incite violence can be exceptions to protected speech.
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ANGRY OUTBURSTS
Tempers flared during a question and answer session as impeachment proceedings stretched into the evening.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, tried to pressure Trump’s attorneys to say whether the former president had lost the election – a reality Trump himself has refused to acknowledge.
“Are the prosecutors right when they claim that Trump was telling a big lie or in your judgment, did Trump actually win the election?” Sanders asked in a written inquiry.
van der Veen bristled and inquired who had asked. Sanders responded, “I did.” van der Veen retorted: “irrelevant.”
“No, it isnt!” Sanders angrily shot back from his desk, adding: “You represent the president of the United States!”
He scoffed audibly when van der Veen avoided answering the question.
Separately, van der Veen at one point complained that the impeachment trial was his “worst experience in Washington.”
“You should have been here on Jan. 6.,” lead prosecutor Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., dryly noted.
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INSURRECTION OR NOT?
The articles of impeachment charge Trump with the “incitement of an insurrection,” a word that Webster’s Dictionary defines as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”
Trump’s lawyers say that’s not technically correct. And they offered some alternative facts to make their point.
“’Insurrection’ is a term of art,” said attorney Bruce Castor, and it “involves taking over a country” or “a shadow government taking the TV stations over and having some plan on what you’re going to do when you finally take power.”
“Clearly this is not that,” he added.
In any event, Trump still wasn’t responsible for what happened after his speech, Castor said.
Trump’s speech, in which he urged his supporters to “fight like hell,“ was actual a call for the “peaceful exercise of every American’s first amendment rights to peacefully assemble and petition their government for redress of grievances,” according to Castor.
And he suggested that Trump wasn’t literally calling on his supporters to “fight,” but rather get involved in the political process, like supporting primary challengers of elected officials they did not like.
Many of Trump’s supporters who participated in the attack found far different meaning in the former president’s words on Jan. 6.
They have said in media interviews, videos taken at the scene and in statements to law enforcement that they were acting on Trump’s orders and aimed to overturn the outcome of the election by stopping Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory — the definition of an insurrection.
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FIGHTING
Donald Trump’s defense team attempted to undermine a key Democratic argument: that the former president incited the attack on the Capitol by urging his supporters to “fight like hell” and “go by very different rules” or they “wouldn’t have a country anymore.”
To do so, they played a lengthy montage of video clips during Friday’s proceedings, which featured President Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats repeatedly uttering the word “fight” during public speeches.
“There is a fight in front of us,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in one clip from November 2019. Another showed Biden talking about taking Trump “behind the gym” to “beat the hell out of him,” like in high school.
The use of the words “fight” or “fighting” is exceedingly common in political speech. The effort by Trump’s legal team amounted amounted to an effort to muddy the waters by drawing an equivalence and ignoring his false claims about voter fraud.
Trump used the word “fight” while trying to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election that he lost. And his use of the word on Jan. 6 came after weeks of baselessly claiming the election was being stolen from him.
There was no widespread fraud in the election, as has been confirmed by election officials across the country and former Attorney General William Barr. Dozens of legal challenges to the election put forth by Trump and his allies were dismissed.
Still, Trump’s lawyers said they were making a valid point by highlighting Democrats’ use of the word “fight.”
“This is not whataboutism,” said Michael van der Veen. “I am showing you this to make the point that all political speech must be protected.”
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DEMOCRATS REACT
Senate Democrats seemed mostly amused by the defense’s video of prominent party leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, repeatedly saying the word “fight.”
Though initially stone-faced and impassionate, as the minutes ticked by some reacted, particularly after their own turn on the screen.
Some giggled, others gasped. Some raised their hands or shrugged.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar rolled her eyes. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fidgeted with a pen during a lengthy section devoted to her. But Sanders, of Vermont, was visibly annoyed.
It “feels like they are erecting straw men to then take them down rather deal with the fact the events (on Jan. 6) happened,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.
Trump lawyers argue impeachment based on ‘hatred,’ not facts
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers accused Democrats of waging a campaign of “hatred” against the former president as they sped through their defense of his actions and fiery words before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, hurtling the Senate toward a final vote in his historic trial.
The defense team vigorously denied on Friday that Trump had incited the deadly riot and said his encouragement of followers to “fight like hell” at a rally that preceded it was routine political speech. They played a montage of out-of-context clips showing Democrats, some of them senators now serving as jurors, also telling supporters to “fight,” aiming to establish a parallel with Trump’s overheated rhetoric.
“This is ordinary political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used by people across the political spectrum for hundreds of years,” declared Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen. “Countless politicians have spoken of fighting for our principles.”
But the presentation blurred the difference between general encouragement to battle for causes and Trump’s fight against officially accepted national election results. The defeated president was telling his supporters to fight on after every state had verified its results, after the Electoral College had affirmed them and after nearly every election lawsuit filed by Trump and his allies had been rejected in court.
The case is speeding toward a vote and likely acquittal, perhaps as soon as Saturday, with the Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and a two-thirds majority required for conviction. Trump’s lawyers made an abbreviated presentation that used less than three of their allotted 16 hours.
Their quick pivot to the Democrats’ own words deflected from the central question of the trial — whether Trump incited the assault on the Capitol — and instead aimed to place impeachment managers and Trump adversaries on the defensive. His lawyers contended he was merely telling his rally crowd to support primary challenges against his adversaries and to press for sweeping election reform.
After a two-day effort by Democrats to sync up Trump’s words to the violence that followed, including through raw and emotive video footage, defense lawyers suggested that Democrats have typically engaged in the same rhetoric as Trump.
But in trying to draw that equivalency, the defenders minimized Trump’s months-long efforts to undermine the election results and his urging of followers to do the same. Democrats say that long campaign, rooted in a “big lie,” laid the groundwork for the mob that assembled outside the Capitol and stormed inside. Five people died.
On Friday, as defense lawyers repeated their own videos over and over, some Democrats chuckled and whispered among themselves as many of their faces flashed on the screen. Some passed notes. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal threw up his hands, apparently amused, when his face appeared. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar rolled her eyes. Most Republicans watched intently.
During a break, some joked about the videos and others said they were a distraction or a “false equivalence” with Trump’s behavior.
“Well, we heard the word ‘fight’ a lot,” said Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet said it felt like the lawyers were “erecting straw men to then take them down rather than deal with the facts.”
“We weren’t asking them fight like hell to overthrow an election,” Blumenthal said.
After the arguments ended, senators asked more than 20 questions of the lawyers, read by a clerk after submission in writing, including several from Republicans who are being closely watched for how they will vote.
GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked about Trump’s tweet criticizing Pence moments after having been told by another senator that the vice president had just been evacuated. Van der Veen responded that at “no point” was the president informed of any danger. Cassidy told reporters later it was not a very good answer
Trump’s defenders told senators that Trump was entitled to dispute the 2020 election results and that his doing so did not amount to inciting the violence. They sought to turn the tables on prosecutors by likening the Democrats’ questioning of the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win to his challenge of his election loss.
The defense team did not dispute the horror of the violence, painstakingly reconstructed by impeachment managers earlier in the week, but said it had been carried out by people who had “hijacked” what was supposed to be a peaceful event and had planned violence before Trump had spoken.
“You can’t incite what was already going to happen,” van der Veen said.
Acknowledging the reality of the January day is meant to blunt the visceral impact of the House Democrats’ case and pivot to what Trump’s defenders see as the core — and more winnable — issue of the trial: Whether Trump actually incited the riot. The argument is likely to appeal to Republican senators who want to be seen as condemning the violence but without convicting the president.
Anticipating defense efforts to disentangle Trump’s rhetoric from the rioters’ actions, the impeachment managers spent days trying to fuse them together through a reconstruction of never-been-seen video footage alongside clips of the president’s months of urging his supporters to undo the election results.
On Thursday, they described in stark, personal terms the terror they faced that January day — some of it in the very Senate chamber where senators now are sitting as jurors. They used security video of rioters searching menacingly for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, smashing into the building and engaging in bloody, hand-to-hand combat with police.
Though defense lawyers sought to boil down the case to a single Trump speech, Democrats displayed the many public and explicit instructions he gave his supporters well before the White House rally that unleashed the deadly Capitol attack as Congress was certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. And they used the rioters’ own videos and words from Jan. 6 to try to pin responsibility on Trump. “We were invited here,” said one Capitol invader. “Trump sent us,” said another. “He’ll be happy. We’re fighting for Trump.”
The prosecutors’ goal was to cast Trump not as a bystander but rather as the “inciter in chief” who spread election falsehoods, then encouraged supporters to come challenge the results in Washington.
The Democrats also are demanding that he be barred from holding future federal office.
Trump’s lawyers say that goal only underscores the “hatred” Democrats feel for Trump. Throughout the trial, they showed clips from Democrats questioning the legitimacy of his presidency and suggesting as early as 2017 that he should be impeached.
“Hatred is at the heart of the house managers’ fruitless attempts to blame Donald Trump for the criminal acts of the rioters — based on double hearsay statements of fringe right-wing groups, based on no real evidence other than rank speculation,” van der Veen said.
Trump’s lawyers noted that in the same Jan. 6 speech he encouraged the crowd to behave “peacefully,” and they contend that his remarks — and his general distrust of the election results — are all protected under the First Amendment. Democrats strenuously resist that assertion, saying his words weren’t political speech but rather amounted to direct incitement of violence.