WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s impeachment team defended him Friday by flatly denying he encouraged the deadly Jan. 6 attack on Congress, insisting that as a “law and order” president he abhorred mob violence.
They sought to puncture the House manager’s case that he incited the attack by reconstructing the timeline of an attack that began even before Trump finished riling up the crowd that would soon swarm the Capitol.
The defense rested its case after just three hours, and the Senate recessed Friday evening at 5:30 p.m. Central time. A vote on the verdict is likely on Saturday after just five days of trial, a record for a presidential impeachment. Final arguments will start at 9 a.m.
“To claim that the president in any way wished, desired or encouraged lawless or violent behavior is a preposterous and monstrous lie,” and “patently absurd,” said Michael van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers.
“This unprecedented effort is not about Democrats opposing political violence. It is about Democrats trying to disqualify their political opposition. It is constitutional cancel culture,” he said. “History will record this shameful effort as a deliberate attempt by the Democrat party to smear, censor and cancel not just President Trump, but the 75 million Americans who voted for him.”
For 12 hours of trial over the previous two days, House prosecutors showed clip after clip of Trump glorifying road rage attacks on Biden backers, promising to pay legal bills for rallygoers who accosted protesters, and fueling outrage with false claims about a stolen election.
Just before the attack, Trump told supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The defense insisted downplayed the use of the term “fight” as a common figure of speech – protected speech – while glossing past the actual violence that ensued after Trump’s bellicose rhetoric.
To illustrate that point, the defense played a 9-minute montage of Democrats and some celebrities using the word “fight,” set to heart-throbbing music, and a shorter compilation later focused on the phrase “fight like hell.”
The clips included most Senate Democrats, House impeachment managers, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, mostly speaking in a political sense but in some instances, with suggestions of physical violence.
“Please stop the hypocrisy,” said David Schoen, another defense lawyer.
The prosecution side anticipated that line of argument.
They had drawn a distinction between heated rhetoric, and heated rhetoric to an angry crowd primed for violence with lies about a stolen election, by a president who glorified violence as patriotic when it advances his aims – rhetoric delivered just before that crowd attacked the Capitol.
Thousands converged on the citadel of American democracy, climbing through windows they’d bashed in with stolen riot shields, and sending lawmakers into hiding.
Even so, van der Veen insisted that nothing Trump told the rally before the riot could be construed as condoning any sort of unlawful act. “Far from promoting insurrection against the United States, the president’s remarks explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully and patriotically,” he said.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, called it “pathetic and amateurish” for Trump’s team to paint his words as innocuous, “an alternative universe recitation of what was really going on in that crowd.”
One especially potent line of argument from the defense involved the timeline of events the day of the riot.
Indictments and arrest documents show that many rioters came to Washington eager for a melee. That showed that the attack was pre-planned, Trump’s team argued, noting that the early stages of the attack started during Trump’s 70-minute speech a mile away.
—By 11:15 a.m. Eastern Time, some of Trump’s supporters had already gathered at the reflecting pool at the foot of Capitol Hill.
—Trump spoke from noon to 1:10 p.m.
—Attackers overran bicycle-type barriers and police at 12:49 p.m.
—As Trump’s speech was ending, the Capitol Police chief called the House and Senate sergeants at arms seeking reinforcements, including National Guard.
“The criminals at the Capitol weren’t there at the Ellipse to even hear the president’s words,” defense lawyer Bruce Castor said. “The Jan. 6 speech did not cause the riots. The president did not cause the riots.”
“The president’s lawyers blew the House managers’ case out of the water,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
House managers reminded senators during a four-hour question phase that bled into Friday evening that Trump had spent weeks spreading the “big lie” that the election had been stolen, and inviting supporters to Washington to interfere in the certification of Biden’s victory.
Trump issued his first of many calls to action on Jan. 6 a full 18 days earlier, promising a “wild” and historic day.
“These insurgents were planning armed violence... because he had been priming them, because he had been amping them up,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, told the Senate in answer to the first question of the afternoon. “That mob didn’t come out of thin air.... You tell somebody that an election victory is being stolen from them, that’s a combustible situation.”
Senators used their questions to drive their preferred narratives.
“Isn’t this simply a political show trial that is designed to discredit President Trump and his policies and shame the 74 million Americans who voted for him?” asked Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, asked Trump’s lawyers when exactly he learned of the breach of the Capitol and what he did about it. Van der Veen sidestepped the question, instead accusing House managers of not taking time to investigate such details.
Sens. Ed Markey and Tammy Duckworth, Democrats, repeated the question, this time for prosecutors.
“The reason this question keeps coming up is because the answer is – nothing,” responded Stacey Plaskett, delegate from the Virgin Islands.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, used a question to sum up the case:
“If a president spins a big lie to anger Americans and stokes the fury by repeating the lie at event after event, and invites violent groups to DC on the day and hour necessary to interrupt the Electoral College count, and does nothing to stop those groups from advancing on the Capitol, and fails to summon the National Guard to protect the Capitol, and then expresses pleasure and delight that the Capitol was under attack, is the president innocent of inciting an insurrection because in a speech, he says, be peaceful?”
Cruz used a question to accuse House Democrats of fabricating a new three-part definition of incitement not based in the code: Was violence foreseeable? Did he encourage violence? Was his behavior willful?
But when it was convenient for him and other Republicans, they were quick to point out the fundamental differences between impeachment and a courtroom trial.
That was Cruz’s explanation for meeting repeatedly during the trial with Trump’s lawyers to offer advice, something that would be improper for a trial judge or juror.
“Get real,” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead impeachment manager, responded to Cruz’s query. “We have an opportunity now to declare that presidential incitement to violent insurrection against the Capitol and the Congress is completely forbidden in the United States.”
In what Democrats described as an exercise in “whataboutism,” the defense showed footage from Jan. 6, 2017, when Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston and others, including Raskin, voiced objections as Congress certified Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.
Biden himself, nearing the end of his term as vice president, was presiding, just as Mike Pence presided on Jan. 6, 2021.
“There is no debate in order,” Biden declared over and over, banging his gavel and cutting off the House members.
In 2017, no senators joined the objections, precluding debate on state-certified results. And Hillary Clinton had conceded, unlike Trump four years later.
The day of the riot, Cruz and Josh Hawley of Missouri led objections that triggered hours of debate. More than half the Republicans in Congress – eight senators and 139 House members, including all but seven of 23 Texas Republicans – voted to nullify millions of votes.
The defense team also showed footage of prominent Democrats musing about punching Trump, or joking about killing opponents, hoping to inure the Senate jury to Trump’s inflammatory language.
Said van der Veen, “This is not ‘whataboutism.’ ...I am showing you this to make the point that all political speech must be protected.”
Trump’s lawyers also invoked a First Amendment defense, asserting that everything Trump said before the riot was protected political speech.
The First Amendment protects citizens from government censorship on political speech. It is not a shield for absolutely everything said verbally, including incitements of violence, let alone an attack on Congress and American democracy.
“He doesn’t just shout fire in a crowded theater,” Raskin told senators, invoking a formulation from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Likening Trump to a fire chief gone bad, he said, “He summons the mob and sends the mob to go burn the theater down,” doing nothing to resolve the crisis even after people “start madly calling him and ringing the alarm bells
“And when we say we don’t want you to be fire chief ever again, he starts crying about the First Amendment,” he said.
House managers spent two days showing graphic footage of of the attack, harping on Trump’s threats against Pence if he refused to overturn Biden’s victory.
Some in the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and evidence uncovered by the FBI shows that some rioters genuinely wanted to find and kill Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Somewhat to the surprise of prosecutors, Trump’s team took the substantive allegations head-on, after hints they would focus on claims the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is now a former president.
The House impeached Trump two weeks before he left office. On Tuesday, the Senate affirmed its authority to pursue the case on a 56-44 vote, with six Republicans joining all Democrats.
It would take 17 Republicans to help Democrats reach the two-thirds needed for conviction.
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