US President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks at a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 presidential election by the US Congress in Washington, US, on January 6, 2021.
Jim Bourg | Reuters
Donald Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday denied that the former president incited a crowd of his supporters to storm the US Capitol, or that he tried to prevent Congress from confirming President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
The arguments in a 14-page filing from Trump’s legal team came a week before his unprecedented second impeachment trial in the Senate begins. Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives last month for an article about inciting an uprising.
Earlier Tuesday, nine impeachment managers from the Democratic House shared an 80-page trial briefing outlining their case for condemning Trump in the Senate and barring him from ever holding federal office again.
Those impeachment managers argued that Trump was “personally responsible” for instigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which killed five and forced an evacuation by a joint session of Congress, derailing their efforts to confirm Biden’s election victory. became.
Trump, at a rally outside the White House just before Congress convened, urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and put pressure on Republican lawmakers to object to the election results. Trump repeatedly called on then Vice President Mike Pence, who chaired the proceedings, to take action to prevent Biden’s victory from being certified.
“If you don’t fight hard, you have no land,” Trump told the crowd. The House impeachment managers included that statement, and many others from the rally, as evidence that Trump was using rhetoric that was “ intended to incite violence. ”
But Trump’s lawyers Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen, in their application, denied that the phrase “had anything to do with the Capitol action, 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 electoral vote counting.”
Castor and Schoen joined Trump’s legal defense a few days ago, after reports that a previous line of lawyers had left the team.
They argued that since Trump was no longer president, any impeachment lawsuit should be dismissed outright because the constitution “requires that a person actually hold office in order to be impeached.”
The House Democrats had anticipated this argument from Trump’s team by writing in their own briefing that “ it is inconceivable ” that the drafters of the constitution “ left us virtually defenseless in his last days against a president’s betrayal, giving him power. could abuse, Oath, and incite revolt 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 account extensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office to his last.”
The majority of Republicans in the Senate apparently agree with Trump’s lawyers. Forty-five GOP senators voted last week to dismiss the process as unconstitutional.
Legal scientists have noted that there is precedent for impeachment after a person leaves office. They point to the 1876 case involving Secretary of War William Belknap, who resigned just before the House voted to impeach him on charges of corruption. The House voted to impeach him, but he was acquitted by the Senate.
Democrats, who hold 50 seats in the Senate, will have to convince at least 17 Republicans to vote to condemn Trump.
The impeachment managers also accused Trump of spreading lies about electoral fraud in the months following his November loss to Biden, falsely claiming that he won the race “by a landslide.”
The impeachment article against Trump stated that the former president’s statements “encouraged – and was expected to result in – lawless action in the Capitol.”
Trump’s attorneys replied that “there is insufficient evidence to allow any reasonable lawyer to conclude that the 45th president’s statements were correct or not, and therefore denies that they were false.”
They added that Trump’s speech was protected by the guarantees of the constitution. “If the First Amendment only protected speech that the government considered popular in today’s American culture, it wouldn’t be protection at all.”
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