This historic second impeachment trial of Donald Trump is set to end with a likely acquittal sometime this weekend, as the former Republican president’s defense lawyers wrapped up their case Friday.
The Senate reconvened at 10 a.m. Saturday, and a final vote had appeared likely. But within an hour after resuming, senators voted to consider hearing from witnesses in the impeachment trial. The move threatened to slow the speedy conclusion.
However, when resuming after noon, the Senate reached a deal to skip witness testimony, allowing the trial to proceed. Closing arguments then started, with the House lead impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin, beginning.
House Democrats began wrapping up their case against Trump after a chaotic morning in which they gave up a last-minute plan for witness testimony that could have significantly prolonged the trial and delayed a vote on whether the former president incited the deadly Capitol insurrection.
But both sides ultimately reached a deal to instead enter into the record a statement from a Republican House lawmaker about a heated phone call on the day of the riot between Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that Democrats say established Trump’s indifference to the violence.
Trump’s lawyers strenuously denied he played any role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, blasting the case against him as politically motivated “hatred” and part of a yearslong Democratic “witch hunt.”
Lawyers for the former president told senators Trump was entitled to dispute the 2020 election results and that his doing so, including in a speech that preceded the assault on the Capitol, did not amount to inciting the violence that followed. They sought to turn the tables on prosecutors by likening the Democrats’ questioning of the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win to his challenge of his election loss. When Trump implored supporters to “fight like hell” on Jan. 6, they said, that was no different from the Democrats’ own charged rhetoric that risks precipitating violence.
“This is ordinarily political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used by people across the political spectrum for hundreds of years,” said Michael van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers. “Countless politicians have spoken of fighting for our principles.”
After a prosecution case rooted in violent images from the Capitol siege, the impeachment trial shifted to defense lawyers who made a fundamental concession: The violence was every bit as traumatic, unacceptable and illegal as Democrats say — but Trump did not order it. Van der Veen said the siege was carried out by people who had “hijacked” for their own purposes what was supposed to be a peaceful event and had made plans for violence before Trump had even spoken.
“You can’t incite what was going to happen,” he said.
“[Democrats] haven’t in any way tied it to Trump,” David Schoen, one of the president’s lawyers, told reporters earlier this week. “They don’t need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened, and you know all about it.”
In both legal filings and in arguments this week, Trump’s lawyers made clear their position the people responsible for the riot are the ones who actually stormed the building and who are now being prosecuted by the Justice Department.
Anticipating defense efforts to disentangle Trump’s rhetoric from the rioters’ actions, the impeachment managers spent days trying to fuse them together through a reconstruction of never-been-seen video footage alongside clips of the president’s monthslong urging of his supporters to undo the election results.
Democrats, who concluded their case Thursday, used the rioters’ own videos and words from Jan. 6 to try to pin responsibility on Trump. “We were invited here,” said one Capitol invader. “Trump sent us,” said another. “He’ll be happy. We’re fighting for Trump.”
The prosecutors’ goal was to cast Trump not as a bystander but rather as the “inciter in chief” who spread election falsehoods, then encouraged supporters to come challenge the results in Washington and fanned the discontent with rhetoric about fighting and taking back the country.
The Democrats also are demanding that he be barred from holding future federal office.
“This attack never would have happened but for Donald Trump,” Rep. Madeleine Dean, one of the impeachment managers, said Thursday as she choked back emotion. “And so they came, draped in Trump’s flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon.”
With little hope of conviction by the required two-thirds of the Senate, Democrats delivered a graphic case to the American public, describing in personal terms the terror faced that day — some of it in the very Senate chamber where senators are sitting as jurors. They used security video of rioters searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, smashing into the building and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police.
“What makes you think the nightmare with Donald Trump and his law-breaking and violent mobs is over?” asked Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, the lead prosecutor. He said earlier, “When Donald Trump tells the crowd, as he did on Jan. 6, ‘Fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore,’ he meant for them to ‘fight like hell.’”
The defense lawyers also returned to arguments made Tuesday the trial itself is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office. The Senate rejected that contention as it voted to proceed with the trial.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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