Trump’s impeachment defense rests
WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s impeachment team defended him Friday by flatly denying he encouraged the deadly Jan. 6 attack on Congress, insisting that as a “law and order” president he abhorred mob violence.
They sought to puncture the House manager’s case that he incited the attack by reconstructing the timeline of an attack that began even before Trump finished riling up the crowd that would soon swarm the Capitol.
The defense rested its case after just three hours, with Sen.
Ted Cruz ducking repeatedly into their meeting room to help the lawyers strategize.
“To claim that the president in any way wished, desired
or encouraged lawless or violent behavior is a preposterous and monstrous lie,” and “patently absurd,” said Michael van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers.
“This unprecedented effort is not about Democrats opposing political violence. It is about Democrats trying to disqualify their political opposition. It is constitutional cancel culture,” he said. “History will record this shameful effort as a deliberate attempt by the Democrat party to smear, censor and cancel not just President Trump, but the 75 million Americans who voted for him.”
For 12 hours of trial over the previous two days, House prosecutors showed clip after clip of Trump urging supporters glorifying road rage attacks on Biden backers, promising to pay legal bills for rally goers who accosted protesters, and fueling outrage with false claims about a stolen election.
Just before the attack, Trump told supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The defense insisted he was merely exercising free speech rights when he claimed, for months, that the election was rife with fraud and exhorted supporters to “fight,” a term they downplayed as a common figure of speech – protected speech – while glossing past the actual violence that ensued after Trump’s bellicose rhetoric.
To illustrate that point, the defense played a 9-minute montage of Democrats and some celebrities using the word
“fight,” set to heartthrobbing music. Later they showed a shorter version focused on the phrase “fight like hell.”
Trump lawyers accused House Democrats of misleading edits of videos, drawing cries of hypocrisy after the defense played their own video enhanced with a soundtrack.
The clips included most Senate Democrats, House impeachment managers, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, mostly speaking in a political sense but in some instances, with suggestions of physical violence.
“Please stop the hypocrisy,” said David Schoen, another defense lawyer.
The prosecution side anticipated that line of argument.
They had drawn a distinction between heated rhetoric, and heated rhetoric to an angry crowd fed lies about a stolen election and primed for violence, primed by a president who glorified violence as patriotic when done to promote his aims – rhetoric delivered just before that crowd attacked the Capitol.
Thousands converged on the citadel of American democracy, climbing through windows they’d bashed in with stolen riot shields, and sending lawmakers into hiding.
“Nothing in the text
(of Trump’s Jan. 6 rally speech) could ever be construed as encouraging condoning or enticing unlawful activity of any kind,” van der
Veen argued. “Far from promoting insurrection against the United States, the president’s remarks explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully and patriotically.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-conn., panned the defense for “trying to draw a false and dangerous equivalency” between Trump’s incitement, which occurred just before violence broke out, and rhetoric not used in the midst of a combustible situation.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-hawaii, called it “pathetic and amateurish” for Trump’s team to paint his words as innocuous, “an alternative universe recitation of what was really going on in that crowd.”
One especially potent line of argument from the defense involved the timeline of events the day of the riot.
Indictments and arrest documents show that many rioters came to Washington eager for a melee. Trump’s team argued the attack was pre-planned, and already underway during Trump’s 70-minute speech a mile away.
— Trump spoke from roughly noon to 1:10 p.m. Eastern Time.
— By 11:15 a.m., some of his supporters had already gathered at the reflecting pool at the foot of Capitol Hill.
— Attackers overran
bicycle-type barriers and Capitol Police at 12:49 p.m.
— Just as Trump’s speech was ending, the Capitol Police chief called the House and Senate sergeants at arms seeking reinforcements, including National Guard.
“The criminals at the Capitol weren’t there at the Ellipse to even hear the president’s words,” defense lawyer Bruce Castor said. “The Jan. 6 speech did not cause the riots. The president did not cause the riots.”
House managers showed that Trump had spent weeks spreading the “big lie” that the election had been stolen, assembling the crowd and priming supporters to interfere in the certification of Biden’s victory to “stop the steal.”
“These insurgents were planning armed violence... because he had been priming them, because he had been amping them up,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-texas, told the Senate in answer to the first question in a four-hour question period Friday afternoon. “That mob didn’t come out of thin air. ... You tell somebody that an election victory is being stolen from them, that’s a combustible situation.”