#impeachment managers

Andrew Prokop at Vox: 

In a surprising turn of events, the Senate briefly considered calling witnesses at the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

But then they decided not to.

On Saturday morning, the House impeachment managers requested seeking the testimony of Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) as part of their case that the former president incited an insurrection. The Senate subsequently voted to debate calling witnesses, and briefly, it appeared the trial could stretch on a good deal longer.

But within hours, a deal was struck behind the scenes to avert that outcome. Trump’s team agreed that Herrera Beutler’s testimony would match her public statements, and Democrats agreed to drop their demand for witnesses, paving the way for the trial to conclude later Saturday.

Now, the outcome of the trial was never in serious question, since Democrats never got anywhere near the 17 Republican Senate votes they’d need to convict Trump. (For instance, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would vote to acquit Trump Saturday morning, ending rumors to the contrary.)

This means the witness question would mainly be about attempting to further unearth facts about what happened, or aimed at hurting Trump’s political support (rather than having a real chance of convicting him). But in the end, political leaders in both parties preferred the trial to end now, rather than dragging it out. Democrats hope to return to a focus on President Biden’s agenda, and Republicans want the focus off Trump’s ugly actions.

Herrera Beutler’s revelations, and Kevin McCarthy’s phone call to Trump, briefly explained

Herrera Beutler became the sudden focus of attention Friday night, after she released a statement recounting what House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told her about a call he had with Trump while the Capitol insurrection was taking place on January 6.

According to Herrera Beutler, McCarthy told her that he asked Trump to forcefully call off the riot, and Trump responded, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” This account indicates that even as the riot unfolded, Trump remained sympathetic to the rioters and reluctant to rein them in.

There had been previous reports that McCarthy had spoken to Trump the day a group of the then-president’s supporters stormed the US Capitol. But CNN reported new details on the matter Friday night, and the report spurred Herrera Beutler — one of just 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of Trump’s second impeachment — to release a statement confirming the account, and calling on other “patriots” with relevant knowledge to come forward.

For weeks, the widespread expectation in Washington was that the House impeachment managers would not request witnesses, acquiescing to a bipartisan desire among party leaders to get the trial over this Saturday.

But the House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (R-MD), seized on this late revelation and, on Saturday morning, revealed that they would request at least one witness — Rep. Herrera Beutler. Raskin said he wanted to subpoena Herrera Beutler and any contemporaneous notes she had, and to get her testimony by Zoom for an hour or less as soon as she was available.

[...]

Party leaders on both sides preferred to end the trial quickly, and after a few hours of negotiation, Raskin agreed to back down, so long as Herrera Beutler’s statement was entered into the record and Trump’s team stipulated her testimony would match that statement. And so the trial is headed to its conclusion.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox: 

During their Friday afternoon impeachment arguments, former President Donald Trump’s attorneys accused Democrats of doing “constitutional cancel culture.” They suggested that antifa was partly responsible for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. They quibbled about a photograph in the New York Times and the meaning of a tweet using the word “calvary.” They made a risible argument that Trump’s impeachment somehow violated the First Amendment.

To combat the House impeachment managers’ striking use of footage from the day of the attack, Trump’s lawyers put together their own short films. One consisted in large part of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) saying the word “fight.” Another featured an extended (and ostensibly less damning) cut of Trump’s infamous “very fine people” comment about the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally of white supremacists. Yet another featured Democrats and celebrities, including Madonna and Johnny Depp, saying nasty and violent-sounding things about Trump. They played that one three separate times.

This sort of nonsense took up most of the team’s short three-hour presentation defending their client against the charge of incitement of an insurrection. Only in the last 40 minutes — the section argued by lead defense attorney Bruce Castor — did Trump’s team make a serious and sustained attempt to rebut the core of the House’s case: that Trump is directly responsible for the violence that took place on January 6.

The attempt didn’t go very well.

Castor ignored key facts, like Trump’s hours-long delay calling in the National Guard during the attack. His logic was at times incoherent, arguing (for example) that Trump’s disdain for Black Lives Matter protesters meant that he disapproved of violence committed by his own supporters as well. And he seemed to completely misunderstand key parts of the House’s case, like the role of Trump’s behavior in the months prior to the January 6 rally.

There really is only one reasonable conclusion to draw after watching the defense’s weak presentation: If this is the best his attorneys can do, Trump’s conduct truly is indefensible.

The many ways Trump’s defense failed

Over the last two days, the House impeachment managers made a very straightforward case for impeaching Trump.

For months, the president spread false and dangerous beliefs suggesting the election was stolen, including specifically calling for his supporters to rally in his defense on January 6 (the day that Congress would certify the election results). Once those supporters arrived, he encouraged them to act on those beliefs during his rally speech — intending to cause violence or, at very least, acting with willful negligence.

And once the mob acted — breaking into the Capitol and threatening elected officials’ lives — for hours he did nothing to stop them, and seemed at times to even encourage the mob. This makes him morally responsible for the insurrection and thus someone who should be convicted and barred from holding public office ever again.

What’s striking about Castor’s arguments is that, for the most part, they didn’t really rebut the core of the House’s case. They either danced around it or outright misinterpreted some of the core issues.

For example, Castor argued that Trump couldn’t have intended for a mob to attack the Capitol because the president hates mobs.

“We know that the president would never have wanted such a riot to occur because his longstanding hatred for violent protesters and his love for law and order is on display, worn on his sleeve every single day that he served in the White House,” Castor said.

But, as House impeachment managers pointed out, Trump has a very long history of encouraging violence by his supporters. At a 2016 rally, for example, he encouraged his supporters to “knock the hell” out of counterprotesters who were throwing tomatoes, adding that “I will pay for the legal fees” if they do.

And when he condemns “violent protesters,” he’s almost always talking about his political enemies — most notably, Black Lives Matter activists and antifa. There is no evidence that Trump has a principled abhorrence of violence, and lots of evidence that he revels in it when committed by his allies against his enemies.

Similarly, Castor argued that because some of the January 6 attackers were prepared for violence beforehand, there’s no way the president’s speech — which encouraged them to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” — could have caused the violence.

“This was a pre-planned assault, make no mistake,” Castor said. “The president did not cause the riots.”

Except the fact that some rallygoers were prepared for violence prior to the speech doesn’t mean that all of them were. Violent militia members from groups like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers only make up a fraction of the arrests from the insurrection. It’s possible that a hardcore minority were prepared to try to attack Congress, but a much larger percentage of the pro-Trump crowd decided to join them after the president’s heated rhetoric inspired them to.

But Castor’s argument also misses something more fundamental: that if Trump hadn’t been falsely calling the election “stolen” for months, and calling on his supporters to try and help him overturn it, there would have been no pre-planned violence in the first place. This entire series of events only became thinkable because Trump had engaged in a sustained and successful campaign to convince millions of Americans that there was a nefarious plot to destroy American democracy. They planned to do violence before the rally because they believed the lies Trump had been telling them; indeed, the House managers showed video in which people storming the Capitol say they were acting on Trump’s orders.

[...]

Castor made a similar error in his discussion of Trump’s infamous January 2 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He argued that Trump did not attempt to incite insurrection during this private phone call — in which Trump asks Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s Georgia victory — and therefore that it was irrelevant.

But this was not the purpose of the House manager’s discussion of that call.

Their point was that the call was an inappropriate and arguably unlawful effort to overturn the results of a legitimate election, proving that Trump had intent to subvert the electoral and legal system in order to get himself installed as president. This is clear enough if you read the article of impeachment, which describes the call as part of Trump’s “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election” — not a direct effort to incite the attack on the Capitol itself.

Nicole Lafond at TPM: 

Much of the evidence Democrats are expected to use in their case to convict ex-President Trump of inciting an insurrection is relatively well known — seared in our minds for the past month by live footage and violent video and photo evidence of his role in encouraging a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol.

But those images together, laid out chronologically to juxtapose photos, videos, tweets and statements, made for a compelling, gutting opening exhibit, introduced by House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

The video montage served as a stark contrast to the Republican “move-on” rhetoric of late, an attempt by Trump’s closest allies to downplay the actual violence of that day, despite many GOPers’ early condemnation of what happened in the immediate aftermath.

The House Impeachment Managers' opening argument of the 2nd impeachment Trial of Donald Trump began with a 13+-minute montage of the rhetoric echoed by Trump that led to the January 6th Capitol insurrection.

Video, via C-SPAN [TW: Graphic Language, Hate Speech, Incitement Of Violence, Right-Wing Terrorism]: