Bruce Castor confuses Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during Trump’s impeachment trial – CBS Philly

Bruce Castor confuses Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during Trump’s impeachment trial – CBS Philly

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PHILADELPHIA (CBS / AP) – Social media is once again mocking Bruce Castor’s defense of former President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial before the United States Senate. During Friday’s hearing, former Montgomery County district attorney mistakenly confused Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Trump was infamously taped asking Raffensperger to overthrow Georgia’s presidential election, which President Joe Biden won by just over 11,000 votes.

Twitter later realized that Castor mistook the Steelers quarterback for Raffensperger.

Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers defended him against impeachment on Friday, accusing Democrats of waging a “hate” campaign against the former president and manipulating his words in preparation for the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol. The presentation included a storm of fierce Democratic comments, selectively edited.

In hours of argument, Trump’s legal team characterized the impeachment case as a politically motivated “witch hunt” – a consequence, they said, of years of efforts to get him out of office – and they sought to narrow the case down to use of a single word, “fight”, in a speech that preceded the January 6 riot. They showed dozens of clips showing Democrats, some of them senators now serving as jurors, using the same word to energize their supporters in speeches against Trump.

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“You did nothing wrong” when using the word, Trump’s lawyer David Schoen told senators. “But, please, stop the hypocrisy.”

Trump’s defense team omitted that what Trump was doing in telling his supporters to “fight like hell” was to undermine a national election after each state verified its results, after the Electoral College confirmed them and after almost everyone the electoral processes filed by Trump and his allies were rejected in court. Instead, they argued, he was telling the crowd to support the primary challenges against his opponents and to push for radical electoral reform – something he had a right to do.

The case is moving towards a conclusion and almost a certain acquittal, perhaps already on Saturday. The defense arguments and the quick pivot for Democrats’ own words deviated from the central question of the trial – whether Trump incited the attack on the Capitol – and instead aimed at putting impeachment managers and Trump opponents on the defensive.

After a two-day effort by Democrats to synchronize Trump’s words with the violence that followed, including through raw and emotional video footage, defense lawyers suggested that Democrats often engage in the same exaggerated rhetoric of Trump .

But in trying to trace that equivalence, supporters downplayed Trump’s month-long efforts to undermine the election results and his insistence on followers to do the same. Democrats say that long campaign, based on a “big lie”, laid the groundwork for the crowd that gathered outside the Capitol and invaded its interior. Five people died.

Without Trump, who in a speech at a rally that preceded the violence told supporters to “fight like hell”, the violence would never have happened, Democrats say.

“And then they came, wrapped in the Trump flag and used our flag, the American flag, to strike and beat,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean, one of the impeachment managers, on Thursday, while suppressing the emotion. “

On Friday, as defense lawyers repeated their own videos over and over, some Democrats laughed and whispered to each other while almost all of their faces appeared on the screen. Some notes were approved. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal raised his hands, apparently amused, when his face appeared on the screen. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar rolled her eyes. Most Republicans watched carefully.

During a break, some joked about the videos and others said they were a distraction or a “false match” with Trump’s behavior.

“Well, we hear the word ‘fight’ a lot,” said Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who joins the Democrats.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennett said it looked like lawyers were “raising scarecrows to take them down, instead of dealing with the facts”

“Show me anytime that the result was that one of our supporters took someone out of the crowd and then we said, ‘This is great, good for you,'” said Delaware Senator Chris Coons.

Trump supporters told senators that Trump had the right to challenge the results of the 2020 elections and that this did not mean inciting violence. They tried to turn the tables on prosecutors by comparing the Democrats’ question about the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016 to the challenge of his defeat in the elections. When Trump begged supporters to “fight like hell” on January 6, he was speaking figuratively, they said.

“This is usually a political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used by people across the political spectrum for hundreds of years,” said Michael van der Veen, another Trump lawyer. “Countless politicians talked about fighting for our principles.”

The defense team did not dispute the horror of the violence, meticulously rebuilt by impeachment managers earlier in the week, but said it was carried out by people who “kidnapped” for their own purposes what was supposed to be a peaceful event and had violence planned before Trump speaking.

“You cannot incite what was going to happen,” he said.

Recognizing the reality of January aims to soften the visceral impact of the House Democrats case and quickly turn to what Trump’s supporters see as the central – and most viable – question of the trial: whether Trump really incited the riot. The argument is likely to attract Republican senators who want to be seen as condemning violence, but without condemning the president.

Anticipating defense efforts to separate Trump’s rhetoric from the actions of rioters, impeachment managers spent days trying to merge them through a reconstruction of never-before-seen video images alongside clips of the president’s months of months asking his supporters to undo the election results.

Democrats, who concluded their case on Thursday, used the videos and words of the Jan. 6 protesters themselves to try to place the blame on Trump. “We were invited here,” said an attacker on Capitol Hill. “Trump sent us,” said another. “He will be happy. We are fighting for Trump. “

The prosecutors’ goal was to launch Trump not as a spectator, but as the “chief instigator” who spread electoral falsehoods, so he encouraged his supporters to come and challenge the results in Washington and fueled discontent with rhetoric about fighting and retaking the country.

Democrats also demand that he be prevented from holding a future federal office.

But Trump’s lawyers say this goal only underscores the “hatred” that Democrats feel for Trump. Throughout the trial, they showed clips of Democrats questioning the legitimacy of his presidency and suggesting as early as 2017 that he should be impeached.

“Hate is at the heart of the unsuccessful attempts by the house administrators to blame Donald Trump for the criminal acts of the rioters based on double-rumored statements by far-right groups based on no real evidence other than grassroots speculation,” said van der Veen.

Trump’s lawyers note that in the same January 6 speech he encouraged the crowd to behave “peacefully”, and they claim that his comments – and his general distrust of the election results – are all protected by the First Amendment. Democrats strongly resist this claim, saying their words were not a political speech, but a direct incitement to violence.

Defense lawyers also returned to arguments presented on Tuesday that the trial itself is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office. The Senate rejected that statement by voting to continue the trial.

On Thursday, with little hope of condemnation for the necessary two-thirds of the Senate, Democrats delivered a graphic case to the American public, describing in personal and austere terms the terror they faced that day – part of it in the Senate chamber itself, where senators now they are sworn. They used security videos of protesters threateningly searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, crashing into the building and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the police.

They displayed the many public and explicit instructions that Trump gave to his supporters – long before the White House rally that unleashed the deadly attack on the Capitol, while Congress certified Democratic Joe Biden’s victory.

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(© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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