Fact-checking: Trump attorneys make multiple false claims in defense of allegations

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Arguing that Trump did nothing to fuel the uprising in the Capitol on Jan. 6, lawyers twisted the facts about both what happened that day and what happened in the past.

Trump attorney Michael van der Veen highlighted comments from Democrats who he believed had promoted or defended violence. Trump, he argued, is different from these Democrats.

“Compare the president’s repeated condemnations of violence with the rhetoric of his opponents,” said Van der Veen. He then played a video that featured clips of Trump condemning violence and calling himself an “ally of all peaceful protesters,” alongside some selectively edited clips of Democrats.

Facts first: This argument and this video were misleading by omission. Trump has indeed condemned violence and called for peaceful protest, but he has also repeatedly acclaimed or defended violence and aggressive behavior.

Among other things, Trump has done since launching his presidential campaign in 2015: praised a Republican congressman for assaulting a journalist; urged police officers not to worry about injuring the heads of suspects they arrest; said he would slap a protester in the face; urged supporters to “knock out the mess” every protester she held with a tomato; said a plot against kidnapping against the Democratic Michigan Government Gretchen Whitmer may not really be a “problem”; approvingly told a fake story about an early 20th century American general who slaughtered Muslim terrorists with bullets dipped in the blood of pigs; said it was a “beautiful sight” when authorities threw a journalist to the ground during unrest in Minneapolis; mocked a reporter who was shot with a rubber bullet; and applauded Trump supporters who surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus on the highway, an incident that sparked an FBI investigation.

Trump’s attorney falsely claims Trump’s first two tweets during the Capitol attack provoked calm

Van der Veen claimed that “the first two messages the president sent via Twitter when the Capitol raid began” urged people to “remain peaceful” and called for “no violence.”

Facts first: This is not true.

Trump’s “keep calm” tweet at 2:38 pm and “no violence” tweet at 3:13 pm were his second and third tweeted posts after the Capitol was breached, not his first. Trump’s first tweet was at 2:24 PM: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution, by giving states the opportunity to certify a corrected set of facts,” not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones they were previously asked to certify. The US demands the truth! ”

Rioters had already entered the US Capitol building by the time of the Trump tweet about Pence.

No, the media did not lie that the 2016 election was hacked

Van der Veen claimed that Washington officials other than Trump are the ones who used reckless and inflammatory rhetoric. He claimed, “The entire Democratic Party and the national news media have repeated for the past four years without any evidence that the 2016 election had been hacked.”

Facts first: The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton Campaign were indeed hacked during the 2016 election campaign; this is a fact, not a statement made “without any evidence”. The American intelligence community special counsel Robert Mueller and the twofold Senate Intelligence Committee all concluded that the Russian government was responsible for stealing and leaking internal documents and e-mails.

If Van der Veen were to suggest that the “entire Democratic Party and the national media” falsely claimed for four years that hackers altered actual votes or vote totals in the 2016 election, that would not be true either. We cannot speak for every word uttered by every Democrat or every journalist since 2016, but it is clearly incorrect to say that the entire party or the entire media has been working on such a claim for four years. The national discussion of hacking in the 2016 election focused on the actual, confirmed hacking targeting the Democrats’ computer systems.

Castor falsely claims that rioters did not attend Trump’s speech in DC

Trump’s attorney Bruce Castor claimed that the rioters who stormed the Capitol did not attend the ex-president’s inflammatory speech that day, proving that the uprising was a pre-planned attack unprovoked by Trump.

“Given the timeline of events, the Capitol criminals weren’t there at the Ellipse to hear the president’s words,” Castor said. “They were more than a mile away, engaged in their planned attack on this same building.”

“This was a pre-planned attack,” said Castor, “make no mistake.” He also claimed that this claim “was confirmed by the FBI, the Justice Department, and even the house managers.”

Facts first: It is not true that none of the accused Capitol rioters attended Trump’s speech beforehand. And Castor is exaggerating the known facts about whether the attack was pre-planned.

Ellipse to the Capitol

True, the timeline shows that someone who attended the entire speech at the Ellipse was not one of the very first people to break the Capitol grounds. But that’s a much more limited statement than Trump’s attorneys.

Court documents and video footage reveal that some Trump supporters took this walk from the Ellipse to the Capitol, which undermines Castor’s claims. This includes a woman who reportedly went from the Trump speech to her hotel and then to the Capitol.
And all of this ignores the fact that insurgents near the Capitol could have listened to Trump’s speech on their phones or been inspired by Trump’s earlier rhetoric.

Pre-planned?

The Justice Department and the FBI have accused some rioters of planning the attacks before coming to Washington, and top prosecutors have said more charges in that direction are expected. But only a handful of the more than 200 criminal cases indicate that rioters had surfaced that day with the intent of breaking the Capitol.

Therefore, Castor chose a few unrepresentative cases from the pool of more than 215 cases to support his misleading claim that federal investigators “confirmed” that this was a “pre-planned attack.”

In interviews with reporters and FBI investigators, some of the rioters said they came to DC for the rally and were later dragged into the crowd as it stormed the Capitol.

No, Georgia did not see a ‘dramatic drop’ in ballot rejections

As evidence of Trump’s efforts to undermine certification of the 2020 election results, the article on impeachment cites Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump asked Raffensperger to “find enough votes to support the outcome of the election. undo presidential elections in Georgia ”.

Castor argued that Trump’s use of the word “find” was “solely related to his concern about Georgia’s inexplicably dramatic drop in rejection rates.”

Facts first: Aside from the intent of Trump’s use of the word “find,” Georgia did not experience a “dramatic drop” in ballot rejections, according to data from the Georgia secretary’s office.

In fact, the total number of rejections in the absence of votes has increased in direct proportion to the number of extra votes compared to the most recent previous election. Ultimately, however, the percentage of ballots rejected remained the same. The Secretary of State of Georgia noted that “The rejection rate for absent ballots with missing or mismatched signatures in the 2020 general election was 0.15%, the same rejection rate for signature issues as the 2018 general election.”
Election Officer Gabriel Sterling responded to Castor’s allegation on Twitter Friday, stating that “shockingly, the disinformation continues.”

Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.

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