“The history of the president’s actions is fascinating and horrifying,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and chief prosecutor, said in an interview. “We think that every American should be aware of what happened – that the reason he was accused by the House and the reason he should be convicted and disqualified to occupy a future federal office is to ensure that such an attack on our democracy and Constitution will never happens again. “
By making Trump the first American president to be impeached twice, Democrats have basically given themselves an unprecedented overhaul. When Congressman Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat, was preparing to sue Trump for a pressure campaign in Ukraine for the first time, he read the record of 605 pages from President Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial from cover to cover, sending as many advisors as 20 dispatches a day, while trying to modernize a process that had occurred only twice before.
This time, a new group of nine Democratic managers needs to go back just a year to study the lessons of Schiff’s accusation: don’t antagonize Republicans, use lots and lots of videos and, above all, make succinct arguments to avoid calming the jury of lawmakers in boredom or distraction.
Trump’s lawyers have indicated that they intend once again to mount a largely technical defense, claiming that the Senate “lacks jurisdiction” to try a former president after he stepped down because the constitution does not explicitly say he can. Although many jurists and the majority of the Senate disagree, Republicans joined the argument en masse as a justification for ending the case without weighing on Trump’s conduct.
But lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David Schoen, also plan to deny that Trump has incited violence or intended to interfere with Congress’ formalization of Biden’s victory, claiming that his baseless claims that the election was “stolen” are protected. by the First Amendment. And Castor told Fox News that he, too, would trust the video, possibly of unrest in American cities led by Democrats.
Managers will try to refute them both with constitutional arguments and with an overwhelming compendium of evidence. Raskin’s team spent dozens of hours selecting a large collection of videos captured by the mafia, Trump’s own sharp words and criminal appeals from protesters who said they acted on the former president’s orders.
The primary source of material can replace the live testimony. Trying to summon new witnesses has been the subject of a long debate among managers, whose record of evidence has several gaps that the White House or military officials could possibly fill. At the last trial, Democrats made the unsuccessful effort by witnesses a centerpiece of their case, but this time, many in the party say it is unnecessary to prove the charge and would simply cost Biden precious time to move his agenda around without changing the outcome. .
“It is not that there should be no witnesses; it’s just the practical realities of where we are with a former president, ”said Daniel S. Goldman, a former House lawyer who worked on Trump’s first impeachment. “This is also something we learned at the last trial: this is a political animal, and these witnesses are not going to touch the needle.”
Raskin and other managers refused to talk about strategy, but current and former employees familiar with confidential preparations agreed to discuss them anonymously. The prosecutors’ near-complete silence in preparation for the trial was another departure from the strategy of Trump’s first impeachment, when Democrats set up a sizeable communications war room on Capitol Hill and saturated the radio waves of cable television in our battle against Mr. Trump in the court of public opinion.
In large part, they left it to trusted allies like Schiff and spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi to publicly discuss their case and counter criticism about why the House is pressing their case, even now that Trump is out of office.
“If we don’t go through with it, we could very well remove any impeachment penalty from the constitution – just remove it,” Pelosi told reporters who questioned why Democrats would spend so much time in Congress with a former president.
The main questions about the scope and form of the study remain unresolved. Senators spent the weekend discussing the precise structure and rules of the process, the first time in American history that a former president will be brought to trial.
Trump’s prosecutors and defense lawyers expected to have at least 12 hours each to present their case. Mr. Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law, has been training his colleagues in daily meetings to aggressively eliminate their arguments, clinging to the narrative whenever possible and integrating them with the visual aids they plan to display on Senate Chamber TVs and on screens across the country.
Behind the scenes, Democrats have many of the same lawyers and advisors who helped set up the 2020 case, including Susanne Sachsman Grooms from the House Oversight and Reform Committee and Aaron Hiller, Arya Hariharan, Sarah Istel and Amy Rutkin from the Judiciary Committee . The House also temporarily called Barry H. Berke, an experienced New York defense attorney, to serve as chief counsel and Joshua Matz, a constitutional expert.
Schiff said his team tried to produce a “HBO miniseries” with clips of testimony from witnesses to bring to life the esoteric plot about Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine. Mr. Raskin may look more like a blockbuster action movie.
“The more you document all the tragic events that led up to that day and the president’s misconduct that day and the president’s reaction while people were being attacked that day, the more and more difficult it becomes for any senator to hide behind these false constitutional fig leaves, ”said Schiff, who advised managers informally.
To set up the presentation, Raskin’s team sought out the same outside company that helped set up Schiff’s multimedia display. But Raskin is working with much richer material to tell a month-long story of how he and his colleagues believe Trump sowed, gathered and provoked a crowd to try to reverse his defeat.
There are clips and tweets from Trump from last summer, warning that he would only lose if the election was “rigged” against him; clips and tweets of him claiming victory after his defeat; and clips and tweets from state officials who came to the White House in an attempt to “prevent theft.” 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 from sympathetic lawmakers who say that once these efforts failed, Trump turned his attention decisively to the Congress meeting on January 6 for a final position.
In the center, there is footage of Mr. Trump speaking outside the White House hours before the crowd overtook the police and stormed the Capitol building. The managers’ pre-trial briefing suggests that 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 by members of the crowd that can be heard processing their words on the reality Time.
“Even with this trial, where the senators themselves were witnesses, it is very important to tell the whole story,” said Schiff. “It is not a single day; it is a course of conduct for a president to use his office to interfere in the peaceful transfer of power. “
But proximity can also create complications. Several people familiar with the preparations said that managers feared to say anything that might implicate Republican lawmakers who echoed or accepted the president’s baseless allegations of electoral fraud. To have any chance of presenting an effective case, administrators believe, they must make it clear that it is Mr. Trump who is on trial, not his party.