Friday, February 12, 2021

On a bed of lies and rage, Trump’s defense rests

 

Opinion: On a bed of lies and rage, Trump’s defense rests

 

 

Opinion by 

Dana Milbank

Columnist

Feb. 12, 2021 at 7:42 p.m. CST

 

If adjectives and adverbs were alibis, former president Donald Trump would be acquitted unanimously.

If hyperbole were exculpatory, he never would have been impeached in the first place.

But, alas, for the former president, his lawyers had little to work with — few facts, scant evidence and unhelpful precedents — to defend Trump against the well-documented case that he conceived, incited and encouraged the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The defense ran out of steam after consuming just 2 hours and 40 minutes of their allotted 16 hours.

 

Yet, even in that brief period, they misstated legal precedents. They invented facts. They rewrote history. Trump lawyer Bruce Castor, panned for his rambling opening argument Wednesday, closed the argument Friday by confusing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

 

But Michael van der Veen, the personal-injury lawyer Trump hired as part of his defense team for the Senate impeachment trial, did have one thing in abundance: words. The best words. Towering, hyperbolic words. Leading off Trump’s defense on Friday, he seemed to believe that if he piled up enough of them, the prosecution’s case would collapse under an avalanche of tangled, angry verbiage.

 

“Unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance.”

 

“Appalling abuse of the Constitution.”

 

“Politically motivated witch hunt.”

 

“A preposterous and monstrous lie.”

 

“Patently absurd . . . the ludicrousness . . . sham. . . . Preposterously wrong . . . shameful . . . constitutional cancel culture!”

 

And this: “No thinking person could seriously believe that the president’s Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse was in any way an incitement to violence or insurrection.”

 

No thinking person!

By contrast, van der Veen apparently can hold complex thoughts in his head. A year ago, he sued Trump, saying the president’s claims that mail-in voting is “ripe with fraud” were supported by “no evidence.” Now, he’s defending Trump on the basis of, well, no evidence.

 

Van der Veen claimed that a 1960s legal precedent involving civil rights leader Julian Bond was about “the exact type of political speech which Mr. Trump engaged in.” Bond’s speech involved opposing the war in Vietnam, not fomenting deadly violence.

Van der Veen informed the Senate that “one of the first people arrested” in the Capitol attack “was a leader of antifa.” This appears to be something Rudy Giuliani fabricated out of whole cloth.

 

Van der Veen reinvented history for the senators, telling them that “the clearing of Lafayette Square” last summer, done for Trump’s famous photo-op with a Bible, actually happened because, in van der Veen’s fanciful vision, racial-justice protesters had “pierced a security wall.”

 

Another Trump lawyer, David Schoen, took it from there. He announced, dramatically, that he had “reason to believe the House managers manipulated evidence.” His support for this heavy charge? One graphic wrote the year as 2020 instead of 2021, and one highlighted tweet should not have had a “blue checkmark.”

 

Schoen also undertook a tangential effort to cast Trump’s infamous words after the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally (“very fine people on both sides”) in a more favorable light.

 

Their arguments were classics of the Trumpian form. The “no puppet, you’re the puppet” trope: They argued that Trump’s opponents — those who protested police brutality last summer — were really the violent ones. The “least racist person in the world” trope: They argued that Trump had been a longtime champion of nonviolence.

 

Presenting the prosecution case, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the lead impeachment manager, cited Voltaire and Thomas Paine. By contrast, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly played videos, set to ominous music, of Democrats (particularly non-White or non-Christian ones) using violent rhetoric, such as the word “fight.” They neglected to point out that several of the clips were of Democrats calling for a “fight” against things such as covid-19, not the election results.

 

In van der Veen’s telling, Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results, including his demand that Raffensperger (not Roethlisberger) “find” him more votes, was all above board: “His entire challenge to the election results was squarely focused on how the proper civic process could address any concerns to the established legal and constitutional system.”

 

Nothing says “proper civic process” like “Stop the steal!”

 

Van der Veen’s adjectival avalanche continued.

 

“Hyperpolitical hatred.”

 

“Total intellectual dishonesty.”

 

“Double hearsay.”

 

“Rank speculation.”

 

“Doctoring the evidence.”

 

As the personal-injury lawyer paused to replenish his stockpile of vituperation, Castor came in to tell the senators not to believe their lying eyes.

 

“Clearly,” he said, “there was no insurrection.”

 

And when all was said and done, Trump’s lawyers still refused to acknowledge that their client lost. Asked whether Trump was “perpetrating a big lie when he repeatedly claimed that the election was stolen from him,” van der Veen shot back angrily: “It’s irrelevant.”

 

On that bed of rage, insults and lies rests Trump’s defense.

 

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