The lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has hit out at the former president’s legal team, describing their defence as “explosive and deranged”.
“They couldn’t get a summer internship with ‘My Cousin Vinny,’” Jamie Raskin, Democratic congressman from Maryland who led the prosecution in the senate, told the Washington Post in an interview after the trial, referencing the Joe Pesci movie about a hapless lawyer.
Rep. Raskin also harshly criticised Republican senators who voted to acquit the former president, likening them to members of a religious cult.
Speaking after the senate failed to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to convict Mr Trump, he said that he believed his strategy was a resounding success, but added that “there’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult”.
"It was a dramatic success in historical terms, it was the largest impeachment conviction vote in US history, and it was by far the most bipartisan majority in the Senate to convict," he said in a separate interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.
"Remember these Republicans who voted to acquit in the face of this mountain of evidence were going to find some reason to do it. We could have had a thousand witnesses but that could not have overcome the kinds of silly arguments that people like [Mitch] McConnell were hanging their hats on,” he said.
Only seven Republicans voted with Democrats to convict Mr Trump, who faced a charge of incitement to insurrection for his speeches to the crowd who went on to storm the US Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January.
In a speech in front of the White House, Mr Trump had encouraged a crowd of thousands to “fight like hell” and “stop the steal” as electoral college votes were being tallied in the senate.
Mitch McConnell, Republican minority leader, voted to acquit Mr Trump but delivered a scathing rebuke of the former president’s actions in a speech following the verdict.
"There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day," he said after the senate vote.
"The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president, and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth."
Mr Trump has shown no contrition for his role in the attack. In a statement released after the verdict, he called the trial “yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country”.
