O VOO DO CORVO

Mark Leibovich Chief National Correspondent

Indeed. This feels like a well-worn Trump defense – which will probably be enough to keep him from getting convicted by this jury. However, the power of the managers video makes this a bit of a tonal mismatch

3:17 PM ET

Trump’s team mounts incendiary defense, seeking to rewrite the narrative of his actions on Jan. 6.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/12/us/impeachment-trial

 

Lawyers for Donald J. Trump began an incendiary but brief defense of the former president on Friday, calling the House’s charge that he incited an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 a “preposterous and monstrous lie” as they falsely equated his conduct to Democrats’ use of combative rhetoric.

 

With Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial moving toward a rapid verdict, his lawyers used its fourth day to channel the former president’s own combative style and embrace of falsehoods to claim, contrary to facts, that Mr. Trump never glorified violence during his presidency and that he consistently called for peace as the rampage at the Capitol unfolded. Repeatedly showing video clips of Democrats urging their supporters to “fight” and Mr. Trump venerating “law and order,” they sought to rewrite not just the narrative of his campaign to overturn the election but that of his entire presidency.

 

“Like every other politically motivated witch hunt the left has engaged in over the last four years, this impeachment is completely divorced from the facts, the evidence and the interests of the American people,” said Michael T. van der Veen, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers. “The Senate should promptly and decisively vote to reject it.”

 

Using a favorite tactic of Mr. Trump’s, his lawyers also sought to defend his behavior by citing that of others, arguing that he could no more be held responsible for the Capitol assault than Democrats could for the violence that erupted at some racial justice protests last summer.

 

Their presentation unfolded after nine House prosecutors spent two days laying out a meticulous case against the former president — dramatized with never-before-seen video of the Jan. 6 riot — portraying the rampage as the direct result of Mr. Trump’s monthslong campaign to overturn the election. Desperate to cling to power, the Democrats argued, Mr. Trump goaded his followers into joining his effort and would do so again if the Senate failed to convict him and bar him from holding office in the future.

 

Mr. van der Veen insisted on Friday that Mr. Trump had only ever been interested in election security reforms, like voter ID laws — an assertion that directly contradicted months of public and private actions by Mr. Trump. He said the president intended for the Jan. 6 rally he hosted before the attack to be peaceful, but that it had been “hijacked” by extremists, including from the far left — another claim disproved even by Republicans.

 

At one point, he also appeared to blame Congress’s political leaders for not being prepared for the attack.

 

“Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump has been entirely consistent in his opposition to mob violence,” he said. Two days earlier, Democrats had shown video of Mr. Trump repeatedly encouraging or looking past violence when it was done in his name.

 

Later, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to vindicate his widely condemned 2017 remark that there had been “very fine people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va.

 

But the bulk of their arguments were legal rather than factual. Mr. van der Veen insisted that Mr. Trump was protected by free-speech rights when he claimed the election had been “stolen” from him and told a crowd he assembled on Jan. 6 to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” saying that those words did not meet the legal definition of incitement.

 

The lawyers also planned to argue that the Senate “lacks jurisdiction” to convict anyway now that the 45th president has left office, even though the Senate already voted to decide that it had the right to hold his trial.

 

Confident they have enough votes from Republicans to acquit Mr. Trump for the second time in little more than a year, they planned to use no more than four of the 16 hours they were allotted, according to people familiar with the planning. That could clear the way for the next phase of the trial, in which senators have up to four hours to pose questions to the prosecutors and defense lawyers, as early as Friday.

 

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

 

— Nicholas Fandos