Impeachment case aims to marshal outrage of Capitol attack
WASHINGTON — When House impeachment managers prosecute former President Donald Trump this week for inciting the Capitol attack, they plan to mount a fast-paced and cinematic case aimed at rekindling the outrage lawmakers experienced on Jan. 6.
Armed with lessons from Trump’s first impeachment trial, which even Democrats complained was repetitive and sometimes sanctimonious, the prosecutors managing his second are prepared to conclude in as little as a week, forgo distracting witness fights and rely heavily on video, according to six people working on the case.
It would take 17 Republicans joining with every Democrat to find Trump guilty, making conviction unlikely. But when the trial opens Tuesday at the very scene of the invasion, the prosecutors will try to force senators who lived through the deadly rampage as they met to formalize President Joe Biden’s election victory to reckon with the totality of Trump’s monthslong drive to overturn the election and his failure to call off the assault.
“The story of the president’s actions is both riveting and horrifying,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD., the lead prosecutor, said in an interview. “We think that every American should be aware of what happened — that the reason he was impeached by the House and the reason he should be convicted and disqualified from holding future federal office is to make sure that such an attack on our democracy and Constitution never happens again.”
In making Trump the first U.S. president to be impeached twice, Democrats have essentially given themselves an unprecedented do-over. When Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-calif., was preparing to prosecute Trump the first time for a pressure campaign on Ukraine, he read the 605-page record of President Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial cover to cover, sending aides as many as 20 dispatches a day as he sought to modernize a proceeding that had happened only twice before.
This time, a new group of nine Democratic managers needs reach back only a year to study the lessons of Schiff’s prosecution: Don’t antagonize Repub
licans, use lots and lots of video and, above all, make succinct arguments to avoid lulling the jury of lawmakers into boredom or distraction.
Trump’s lawyers Monday denounced the impeachment case against him as partisan “political theater,” arguing on the eve of the Senate’s trial that he bore no responsibility for the deadly assault on the Capitol and that trying a former president at all was unconstitutional.
In a 78-page brief submitted to the Senate, the lawyers asserted that Trump’s speech just before the attack “did not direct anyone to commit unlawful actions” and that he deserved no blame for the conduct of a “small group of criminals” who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6 after he had urged them to “fight like hell” against his election loss. They also insisted that the Senate “lacks jurisdiction” to try him at all because he was now a private citizen, calling such an effort “patently ridiculous.”
The arguments constituted Trump’s first sustained defense since the violence of Jan. 6. They concluded with the lawyers urging senators to promptly dismiss the single, bipartisan “incitement of insurrection” charge when the trial convened today.
“This impeachment proceeding was never about seeking justice,” wrote the lawyers, Bruce Castor, David Schoen and Michael van der Veen. “Instead, this was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on Jan. 6 by a few hundred people.”
The defense’s road map arrived as the rules and timeline for the trial came into sharper focus Monday. Top Senate leaders reached a bipartisan agreement for an exceedingly swift proceeding that would begin Tuesday with up to four hours of debate followed by a vote on the constitutionality questions.
Because Trump is the first ex-president ever to be subject to an impeachment trial, the constitutionality question has loomed over the proceedings. Republicans, in particular, have embraced it to try to justify a speedy acquittal.
Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, argue that the founders never intended to exempt someone like Trump from trial — a president who was impeached while in office but left before senators could judge him. They note that the Senate voted in the 19th century to try a former war secretary and can do so now for a president who is no longer in office.
The House impeachment managers echoed that argument in their own five-page memo filed Monday rebutting Trump’s effort to dismiss the charge as “wholly without merit.”
“Presidents swear a sacred oath that binds them from their first day in office through their very last,” they wrote. “There is no ‘January Exception’ to the Constitution that allows presidents to abuse power in their final days without accountability.”
They were just as blunt about Trump’s more substantive defenses: “To call these responses implausible would be an act of charity,” they wrote.
Neither party has much interest in allowing a proceeding, the second impeachment trial of Trump in just over a year, drag on. Republican leaders worry that days of intense focus on the former president’s mendacious campaign to overturn his election loss could further cleave their party.
And for Democrats now in control of Congress and the White House, the proceeding threatens to complicate President Joe Biden’s attempts to quickly pass a nearly $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill.
If a simple majority of senators agree to move forward after today’s debate, as expected, the prosecution and defense would have up to 16 hours each to present their cases starting at noon Wednesday. The trial is expected to break Friday evening and reconvene Sunday to honor the Jewish Sabbath at the request of Trump’s lawyers. It could conclude as early as next week, faster than any presidential impeachment trial in American history.
Raskin’s team has spent dozens of hours culling a deep trove of videos captured by the mob, Trump’s own unvarnished words and criminal pleas from rioters who said they acted at the former president’s behest.
The primary source material may replace live testimony. Trying to call new witnesses has been the subject of an extended debate by the managers, whose evidentiary record has several holes that White House or military officials could conceivably fill. At the last trial, Democrats made an unsuccessful push for witnesses a centerpiece of their case, but this time, many in the party say they are unnecessary to prove the charge and would simply cost Biden precious time to move his agenda without changing the outcome.
“It’s not that there should not be witnesses; it’s just the practical realities of where we are with a former president,” said Daniel Goldman, a former House lawyer who worked on Trump’s first impeachment. “This is also something that we learned from the last trial: This is a political animal, and these witnesses are not going to move the needle.”
Schiff said his team had tried to produce an “HBO miniseries” featuring clips of witness testimony to bring to life the esoteric plot about Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine. Raskin’s may appear more like a blockbuster action film.
“The more you document all the tragic events leading up to that day and the president’s misconduct on that day and the president’s reaction while people were being attacked that day, the more and more difficult you make it for any senator to hide behind those false constitutional fig leaves,” said Schiff, who has informally advised the managers.
To assemble the presentation, Raskin’s team has turned to the same outside firm that helped put together Schiff’s multimedia display. But Raskin is working with vastly richer material to tell a monthslong story of how he and his colleagues believe Trump seeded, gathered and provoked a mob to try to overturn his defeat.
There are clips and tweets of Trump from last summer, warning he would only lose if the election was “rigged” against him; clips and tweets of him claiming victory after his loss; and clips and tweets of state officials coming to the White House as he sought to “stop the steal.” There is audio of a call in which Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes needed to reverse Biden’s victory there; as well as presidential tweets and accounts by sympathetic lawmakers who say that once those efforts failed, Trump decisively turned his attention to the Jan. 6 meeting of Congress for one last stand.
At the center is footage of Trump, speaking outside the White House hours before the mob overtook the police and invaded the Capitol building. The managers’ pretrial brief suggests they are planning to juxtapose footage of Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell” and march to the Capitol and confront Congress with videos posted from members of the crowd who can be heard processing his words in real time.
“Even with this trial, where senators themselves were witnesses, it’s very important to tell the whole story,” Schiff said. “This is not about a single day; it is about a course of conduct by a president to use his office to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.”
But the proximity could also create complications. Several people familiar with the preparations said the managers were wary of saying anything that might implicate Republican lawmakers who echoed or entertained the president’s baseless claims of election fraud. To have any chance of making an effective case, the managers believe, they must make clear it is Trump who is on trial, not his party.
Podcasting holds a strong allure for would-be media disrupters and visionaries. In the still-developing medium, they see wet clay, capable of being molded into an ideal vessel for long-form narrative journalism or fiction or game shows or musicals or memoir. ¶ Add Paris Hilton to their ranks. Hilton, master of an earlier mass-communications era in the tabloid-fueled early aughts, is getting into the podcast business with a new company, her own show and an unusual spin on a form that will seek to create an audio equivalent to social media.
“This Is Paris” will debut Feb. 22 in partnership with iheartmedia, the radio giant that has become one of the largest distributors of podcasts, with more than 750 shows collecting more than 250 million downloads per month.
Aimed at Hilton’s over 40 million followers across social media platforms, the new show will offer a mix of personal content and conversations with her family, friends and other celebrities. It will be the flagship of a planned slate of seven shows to be produced by Hilton’s company, London Audio, and the iheartpodcast Network. The other programs, featuring different hosts, will be released over the next three years.
“I’ve always been an innovator and first mover when it comes to reality TV, social, Djing, and now I really believe that voice and audio is the next frontier,” she said in an interview.
A key feature of her podcast will be its use of a format that Hilton is calling “Podposts”: short (between one and three minutes), stripped-down dispatches meant to mimic the cadence and tone of posts on social media. The “This Is Paris” podcast feed will host longer (around 45 minutes), more traditionally produced episodes weekly, with intermittent Podposts filling in the gap several times per week.
“I really believe that it is like another form of social media,” Hilton explained. “I do so many things — being a DJ, a businesswoman, a designer and an author — so there will be a lot for me to talk about.”
Preplanned categories of Podposts will be inspired by Hilton’s famous catchphrases, including “That’s Hot” for product recommendations, “Loves It” for culture recommendations and “This Is my Hotline,” in which Hilton will respond to voicemail messages sent in by listeners. Conal Byrne, president of iheartpodcast Network, said the company is looking to partner with brands for sponsorship at different levels.
“Her power to recommend products to her fans that she believes in is just about unrivaled,” Byrne said.
Since the end of “The Simple Life,” her reality television series with Nicole Richie, in 2007, Hilton, who will turn 40 this month, has branched into a wide range of industries through her company, Paris Hilton Entertainment. Its assets include 45 retail stores and 19 product lines across categories like fragrance, fashion and accessories. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Hilton was a sought-after DJ around the world, for which she has been paid a reported $1 million per gig.
In this new deal, iheartmedia will fully fund the slate of shows produced in partnership with London Audio at a budget of multiple millions of dollars. The two companies will be joint partners in each show and split all revenue streams. After “This Is Paris,” the rest of the slate is expected to be geared toward subjects including beauty, wellness, dating, philanthropy and technology, with Hilton and Bruce Gersh, president of London Audio, serving as executive producers.
“This is a medium that has so many dimensions and really allows you to connect to an audience in a unique way,” Gersh said. “Paris wanted to jump in wholeheartedly. ”hilton, who named “Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions” and Kate and Oliver Hudson’s “Sibling Revelry” as among her favorite podcasts, immersed herself in the medium while grounded at home in Los Angeles during the pandemic.
“Usually, I’m traveling 250 days a year and working constantly,” she said. “During this whole year in quarantine, I’ve had more free time than I’ve ever had in my career. So I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and getting really interested. When I’m cooking or working or doing my art, I always have them on in the background.”
Podcasts have become a favored outlet for celebrities seeking to engage with fans in more depth than is possible in a typical post on Instagram or Twitter, while avoiding the scrutiny and vulnerability that comes with speaking to the press. Name recognition is a powerful advantage on the platform — shows by celebrity podcasters like Dax Shepard, Jason Bateman, Anna Faris and Bill Burr appear regularly in the Top 50 of the Apple Podcasts charts. (In addition to the Hilton deal, iheartmedia has struck joint partnerships with Will Ferrell and Shonda Rhimes for slates of shows.) And podcast audiences tend to be a relatively friendly bunch: There are no comments sections to elevate unpleasant behavior, and podcasts by their nature require a level of active engagement that discourages drive-by detractors.
“I think once people understand that this is a platform where they can directly interact with their fans without any kind of middle person, it becomes a very attractive proposition,” said Tom Webster, senior vice president of Edison Research, a media research firm.
Webster added that Hilton’s Podposts concept reminded him of the proto-podcast field of audio blogging, in which writers for websites like The Quiet American and The Greasy Skillet posted short audio diaries. “It allows them to stretch out into their personal interests in a way they don’t get to in their day job,” he said.
“This Is Paris” shares a name with Hilton’s Youtube documentary, released last fall. In that film, which has nearly 20 million views, she distances herself from the blithe, ditsy persona with which she has been identified since emerging in the glare of paparazzi bulbs two decades ago. Hilton also says that she was abused by administrators at a private boarding school she attended as a teenager, an experience by which she remains traumatized.
The podcast is meant to follow in the same candid vein. Hilton is recording it at a home studio (built for her music projects) and using her much-discussed natural voice (which, to my ear, is deeper than her most girlish trill but not a dramatic departure).
“She talks in a way that’s very relaxed and accessible, as opposed to someone who is putting on a performance,” Byrne said. “Right away she was a natural at making it feel like a one-on-one phone call and not a one-to-many media asset.”
For Hilton, recording the pilot for the show did feel uncomfortable at first — unlike on social media, there were no glamorous photos or videos to hide behind. “It’s only about the knowledge you’re bringing and what you’re saying with your voice,” she said.
But soon she fell into a groove. After a lifetime of being the subject of interviews, she’s been enjoying “turning the tables” as the one asking questions. Compared with her old jobs, the commute isn’t bad either.
“I love being a homebody,” she said, reflecting on her new chapter. “I’ve worked so incredibly hard to build my empire — now I get to finally enjoy it.”