Senate hears second day of trial House prosecutors lay out evidence against Trump
WASHINGTON – The battle to shape the legacy of former President Donald Trump moved into its second day Wednesday with House prosecutors professing hope they could still win over Senate Republicans, but also looking beyond their immediate audience to the wider American public.
Repeatedly using Trump’s own words, the impeachment managers laid out a case they said showed he acted methodically over a period of months to prepare his followers to use violence to try to keep him in office.
The violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 came about because “President Donald J. Trump ran out of non-violent options to maintain
power,” said Rep. Ted
Lieu, D-calif., one of the impeachment managers.
Trump’s actions were “deliberate, planned and premeditated,” impeachment manager Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-calif., told senators as he laid out a series of statements by the former president in which Trump called on supporters to try to block election counts and, once that failed, told them to rally in Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress met to formally accept the tally of electoral votes.
The House prosecutors followed those arguments with dramatic video footage, some of it from Capitol security cameras, showing the rioters storming the Capitol and using wooden beams and riot shields to smash windows. The videos detailed how closely the mob came to intercepting senators who were being evacuated from their chamber, the same venue in which the trial is now unfolding.
“They were just feet away from one of the doors of this chamber, where many of you remained at that time,” Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands told senators.
For the opening minutes of the attack, Vice President Mike Pence was in a room roughly 100 feet away, Plaskett said as she played videos of rioters shouting “Hang Mike Pence.”
The first hours of
arguments provided little evidence that any minds were being changed. While the video of the attack caused several senators to stand to get a better look, some Republican supporters of Trump in the Senate could be seen reading papers or doodling during the impeachment managers’ speeches.
“There’s nothing new here, for me, at the end of the day,” said Sen.
Josh Hawley, R-MO. “I think that we don’t have jurisdiction as a court in order to pursue this, so nothing that I’ve seen changes my view on that.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he spoke with Trump on Tuesday night and stressed to him that enough Republican senators would stick with him to guarantee an acquittal.
“I reinforced to the [former] president, the case is over. It’s just a matter of getting the final verdict now,” Graham said.
Democrats said that they had not given up hope of convincing some additional Republicans to vote to convict Trump.
Their arguments, which were expected to continue for part of today, were designed principally with three themes in mind:
First, they sought to rebut the main argument by Trump’s defense lawyers that the president’s speech on the day of the riot, along with his other remarks, cannot be punished because his words are protected by the 1st Amendment. The House prosecutors argued
to the contrary, saying what Trump said and did was to specifically incite violence.
“President Trump cannot say, ‘I didn’t know what I was inciting,’” Swalwell said. Repeated confrontations between Trump supporters and election officials around the country in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol showed clearly that the potential for violence was escalating.
“There was plenty of evidence that his words had consequences, and if he wanted to stop it, he could stop it.”
Even on the day of the riot, Trump had the power – and a legal duty – to try to stop the violence by his supporters but failed to act, said Rep. Joe Neguse, D-colo. “He alone had that power,” Neguse said. The rioters “believed they were following his orders.”
The chief impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD., in his speech opening the prosecution case, referred to a famous remark by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that the Constitution did not protect a person who falsely shouted “fire” in a crowded theater.
The impeachment managers hoped the video evidence would drive home their second theme: that Trump’s actions threatened the lives and safety of members of Congress and their staffs.
Finally, the prosecutors repeatedly depicted Trump as having crossed lines
that other elected officials would not – an effort to persuade Republicans that they can separate themselves from him.
“All of us in this room have run for election, and it’s no fun to lose,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-texas) said. But, he said, elected
officials know that when they lose, they have to accept the will of the voters, which Trump refused to do.
In laying out their case, the impeachment managers have a dual audience.
Their immediate target is the senators sitting in front of them, evenly divided by party. Because conviction in an impeachment case
requires a two-thirds vote, 17 Republicans would have to vote to convict, assuming all Democrats vote against Trump. At this point, the number of Republicans willing to vote against Trump appears to be no more than half that.
But Democrats know that, beyond the Senate, the arguments and, in particular, the video evidence they’re
presenting can reach a broader public. They have invested heavily already in an effort to convince voters that Trump and the Republicans who support him have sided with extremists, and further evidence of Trump’s complicity in the riot will reinforce that connection in voters’ minds, Democratic strategists believe.