Trump lawyers hit impeachment trial as politically motivated 'hatred'
Donald Trump’s lawyers delivered a relatively brief defense of the former president’s conduct in his second impeachment trial Friday, accusing House Democrats of staging a politically motivated proceeding in a rebuttal that echoed Trump’s misleading claims about the 2020 presidential election.
The centerpiece of the Trump attorneys’ case was a video that edited together one Democratic official after another using the word “fight.” While meant to argue that Democrats, too, used potentially violent rhetoric, many of the comments were taken out of context, and none led to incidents of violence.
Trump’s lawyers used just two and a half of the 16 hours allotted to them for their defense, their brevity underscoring that at least 34 GOP senators are expected to vote to acquit the ex-president and allow him to escape the prospect of being barred from public office.
Yet their presentation was rife with the sort of falsehoods that marked Trump’s campaign and his unsuccessful effort to overturn the election results. Lawyers spread Trump’s contention that President Biden did not actually win the state of Georgia, implied that antifa and other leftists were involved in planning of the attack of the Capitol and accused Democratic House managers of withholding key evidence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-impeachment-trial-trump/2021/02/12/8f53ceb4-6d3a-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html
