Legal practitioners for Donald Trump on Tuesday denied that the former president incited a mob of supporters to storm the Capitol or that he judged to stop Congress from confirming President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
The arguments came one week more willingly than Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment trial is set to begin in the Senate. Trump was impeached in the House last month on one article of influencing an insurrection.
Earlier Tuesday, nine Democratic House impeachment managers shared an 80-page trial brief put down out their case for convicting Trump and barring him from ever holding federal office again.
Those impeachment overseers argued that Trump was “personally responsible” for inciting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, which left five cool and forced an evacuation by a joint session of Congress, derailing their efforts to confirm Biden’s win.
Trump, during a take a turn for the better outside the White House just before Congress convened that day, urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and coerce Republican lawmakers to object to the election results. Trump repeatedly called out then-Vice President Mike Pence, who was regulating over the proceedings, to take action to stop Biden’s win from being certified.
“If you don’t fight like hell you’re not succeeding to have a country anymore,” Trump told the crowd. The House impeachment managers included that statement, and numerous others from the meet, as evidence of Trump using rhetoric that was “calculated to incite violence.”
But Trump’s lawyers, Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen, believed in a 14-page filing that the phrase had nothing to do “with the action at the Capitol as it was clearly about the need to fight for designation security in general.”
“It is denied that President Trump incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior,” they a postcarded. “It is denied that President Trump intended to interfere with the counting of Electoral votes.”
Castor and Schoen enlist ined Trump’s legal defense just days ago, following reports that a previous slate of lawyers had quit the band.
They also argued that since Trump was no longer president, an impeachment trial ought to be dismissed out of clap because the Constitution “requires that a person actually hold office to be impeached.”
The House Democrats had anticipated this scrap from Trump’s team, writing in their own brief that “it is unthinkable” that the framers of the Constitution “left us less defenseless against a president’s treachery in his final days, allowing him to misuse power, violate his Oath, and incite insurrection against Congress and our electoral homes simply because he is a lame duck.”
“There is no ‘January Exception’ to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution,” the Democrats suggested. “A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last.”
The majority of Republicans in the Senate plainly agree with Trump’s lawyers. Forty-five GOP senators voted last week to dismiss the trial as unconstitutional.
Statutory scholars have noted that there is precedent for an impeachment after a person leaves office. They dot to the 1876 case involving Secretary of War William Belknap, who resigned just before the House voted to impeach him on corruption censures. The House voted to impeach him but he was acquitted by the Senate.
Democrats, who hold 50 seats in the Senate, will have to dispose at least 17 Republicans to vote with them in order to convict Trump.
The impeachment managers also accused Trump of shell out the months after his November loss spreading lies about election fraud and falsely claiming he won the race “by a landslide.”
The article of impeachment against Trump averred the former president’s statements “encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol.”
Trump’s lawyers responded that “Deficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were exact or not, and he therefore denies they were false.”
They added that Trump’s speech was protected by the safeguards of the Constitution: “If the Elementary Amendment protected only speech the government deemed popular in current American culture, it would be no protection at all.”
Castor and Schoen also took question major with the choice of Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and senior lawmaker in the Senate, to preside over the trial.
Choice Court Chief Justice John Roberts oversaw Trump’s first impeachment, as the Constitution requires. But Roberts declined to surmise the same role for Trump’s second trial, as the Constitution has no such mandate for the impeachment of a former president.
Trump’s counselors-at-law lamented in their brief that Roberts was “replaced by a partisan Senator who will purportedly also act as a juror while hold sway over on certain issues.”
“The House actions thus were designed to ensure that Chief Justice John Roberts make not preside over the proceedings,” they wrote, “which effectively creates the additional appearance of bias with the affairs now being supervised by a partisan member of the Senate with a long history of public remarks adverse to the 45th President.”