U.S. President Donald Trump gesticulates while speaking during a rally to challenge the certification of the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election by the U.S. Congress in Washington, USA, January 6, 2021.
Jim Bourg | Reuters
Donald Trump’s lawyers denied on Tuesday that the former president incited a crowd of his supporters to invade the United States Capitol, or that he tried to stop Congress from confirming President Joe Biden’s victory at the Electoral College.
The arguments in a 14-page document from Trump’s legal team came a week before his second unprecedented impeachment trial began in the Senate. Trump was impeached in the House last month because of an article urging an insurrection.
On Tuesday, nine impeachment managers from the House of Democrats shared an 80-page trial report outlining their case for condemning Trump in the Senate and preventing him from taking a federal seat again.
Impeachment managers argued that Trump was “personally responsible” for inciting the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, which left five dead and forced an evacuation in a joint session of Congress, hampering his efforts to confirm Biden’s election victory.
Trump, during a rally outside the White House shortly before the Congress meeting, asked his supporters to march to the Capitol and pressure Republican lawmakers to oppose the election results. Trump repeatedly called on then Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the proceedings, to take steps to prevent Biden’s victory from being certified.
“If you don’t fight like the devil, you won’t have a country anymore,” Trump told the crowd. House impeachment administrators included this statement, and several others at the rally, as evidence of Trump using rhetoric that was “calculated to incite violence”.
But Trump’s lawyers, Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen, in their lawsuit denied that this phrase “had anything to do with the action on Capitol Hill, as it was clearly about the need to fight for electoral security in general.”
“It is denied that President Trump has incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior,” they wrote. “It is denied that President Trump intended to interfere in the counting of electoral votes.”
Castor and Schoen joined Trump’s legal defense a few days ago, after reports that a previous series of lawyers had left the team.
They argued that since Trump was no longer president, an impeachment trial should be rejected immediately because the constitution “requires a person to actually be in office to be impeached.”
House Democrats had anticipated this argument by the Trump team, writing in their own report that “it is unthinkable” that the authors of the Constitution “left us virtually defenseless against a president’s betrayal in his final days, allowing him to misuse of power, violate his Jure and incite insurrection against Congress and our electoral institutions simply because he is a lame duck. “
“There is no ‘January exception’ for impeachment or any other provision of the constitution,” argued the Democrats. “A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office, from the first day to the last.”
Most Republicans in the Senate apparently agree with Trump’s lawyers. Forty-five Republican senators voted last week to dismiss the trial as unconstitutional.
Jurists have noted that there are precedents for an impeachment after a person leaves office. They point to the 1876 case involving Secretary of War William Belknap, who resigned shortly before the House voted to impeach him on corruption charges. The House voted against him, but he was acquitted by the Senate.
Democrats, who hold 50 seats in the Senate, will have to persuade at least 17 Republicans to vote to condemn Trump.
Impeachment managers also accused Trump of spending the months after his November defeat for Biden spreading lies about electoral fraud and falsely claiming that he won the race “by an overwhelming victory”.
The impeachment article against Trump said the ex-president’s statements “encouraged – and predictably resulted in – lawless actions on Capitol Hill”.
Trump’s lawyers responded that “There is insufficient evidence on which a reasonable lawyer could conclude that the 45th president’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies that they are false.”
They added that Trump’s speech was protected by constitutional safeguards. “If the First Amendment only protected the speech that the government considered popular in American culture today, there would be no protection at all.”
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