“DONALD
TRUMP INCITED VIOLENCE TO MAINTAIN POWER, AND PEOPLE DIED”: THE DEMOCRATS
ARGUING THE CASE AGAINST TRUMP WILL BRING THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE TO BEAR
This
time around, the Democrats’ impeachment managers were firsthand witnesses to
the havoc wreaked by Donald Trump. And they’ll do everything in their power to
sway the Senate in their favor.
FEBRUARY 5, 2021
It was shortly after 2 p.m. on January 6, when he had just
finished rebuking Republicans’ rejection of Joe Biden’s election
victory in key states, that Congressman Joe Neguse knew
something was wrong. Engaged in presenting his argument on the House floor, the
Colorado congressman had missed the frantic text messages from friends and
family and the videos of rioters descending on the Capitol populating social
media. Then he saw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, followed
shortly after by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, escorted out of
the chamber by Capitol Police. At first, like many of his colleagues, Neguse
thought it might be a precaution; Pelosi was high in the order of succession.
As Jim McGovern, the chairman of the House Rules Committee,
picked up the gavel and continued the proceedings, “I assumed that we would
continue with our work,” Neguse recalled. The notion that rioters would make it
inside the Capitol was unfathomable.
Then, the announcements began—at first from
the Sergeant at Arms and later a Capitol Police officer. Lawmakers realized
that the Capitol had been breached, as hundreds of Donald Trump supporters
forced their way into the building. McGovern gaveled out the proceedings. “Sit
down,” rang through the chamber. They were told to put on gas masks that had
been stashed under their seats and prepare to shelter in place. As sounds of
banging and breaking glass bounced through the chamber, the House chaplain
offered a prayer. And Neguse, along with the other eight lawmakers whom Pelosi
would later name as House managers to guide the Senate through Trump’s second
impeachment trial, became a witness to the case against the president.
“It was a very intense day, but I don’t think
I fully appreciated just how dangerous it had gotten that day until several
days later,” Joaquin Castro, another impeachment manager,
said. “It’s been a process of really learning everything that went on that day
and just how close we came to not just mayhem…but even more carnage.”
On Tuesday, a little over one year after his
acquittal in the Ukraine impeachment, Trump will once again face trial in the
Senate. Led by Congressman Jamie Raskin, the impeachment
managers—who are, in addition to Neguse and Castro: Diana DeGette, Eric
Swalwell, David Cicilline, Madeleine Dean, Ted Lieu, and Stacey
Plaskett—will argue that former president Trump was “singularly
responsible” for the siege on the Capitol, which resulted in five deaths,
and two officers who responded to
the riots have since taken their lives. “If provoking an insurrectionary riot
against a joint session of Congress after losing an election is not an
impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be,” the managers wrote
in an 80-page trial brief filed earlier this
week.
Whereas Trump’s first impeachment and
subsequent Senate trial were a bit convoluted, rooted in complicated
international politics with an endless network of characters, Democrats see a
clear-cut case in round two. That it played out on live television and social
media for all of America to see only bolsters their confidence. “They did a
magnificent job historically laying out the high crimes and misdemeanors of the
president in that case,” said Dean, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee
and was trapped in the gallery during the riot. “This case is so tragically
different. This was an attack incited by the president, by Americans, against
Americans; domestic terrorists, incited by a president,” she told me. “It’s
absolutely stunning.”
For much of Trump’s first and only term, Speaker Pelosi acted as
a bulwark against impeachment, set instead on protecting vulnerable members,
who either flipped seats from red to blue or won in districts Trump carried in
2016. She only backed the move after a phone call with Trump, in which, she told me, he admitted “to what he
had done.” There was no such hesitancy—from Pelosi or from other moderate
Democrats—this time around. Plaskett, representative for the U.S. Virgin
Islands and a member of the moderate New Democrats Coalition, was among those
reluctant to impeach the first time around; some feared it could work to boost
Trump’s popularity, if Americans took it as a partisan exercise. “I don’t think
the facts themselves were so on display for [every American] household,” she
said. With this impeachment, and its ample video evidence viewed by millions in
real time, Democrats want to make sure Trump can never run for office
again.
Plaskett had been putting on her jacket to
head down to the House floor to offer her condolences to Raskin, who had
tragically buried his son Tommy just the day before and had been her professor
in law school, when the proceedings on the House floor were abruptly halted and
members were told to lock their doors. She spent much of the night of January 6
locked in her office. Speaking just days after the attack on the Capitol she
recalled how her daughter got a text message from a friend asking, “Is your mom
at work?” “There was a coup against our government that was so on display and
so evident,” she said. “I think it’s so much easier to come to the conclusion
that this president had to be impeached—that if we did not, we would be blind
to a prima facie case that was on display for all of us.”
It was so evident to Democrats that Trump’s
rhetoric in the lead up to the siege—for weeks before and at his “Stop the
Steal” rally earlier that day—amounted to an impeachable offense that a group
began drafting articles against the president as the riot ensued and before the
Capitol was secure. After Lieu was forced to evacuate the Cannon House office
building—“It was not a good sign that I was told to take off my number pin that
designates me as Congress,” Lieu said—he sought refuge in Cicilline’s office in
the Rayburn building. With a skeleton crew of staff, the two lawmakers began to
brainstorm in hushed voices, locked in a room with the shades drawn and the
door barricaded as they had been instructed. “Even though the president only
had a short time remaining in his term, I thought it was incredibly important
that we proceed. It was too dangerous a precedent,” Cicilline told me. “He was
a clear and present danger to our country and to our democracy and to the
well-being of this country. And so for me, it was so clear that we had to move
and we had to move quickly.” At first, their focus was on the 25th Amendment,
which would require Trump’s Cabinet to remove him, but ultimately shifted to
impeachment. With remote input from Raskin, Pelosi, and House Judiciary
staffers, a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and one
article of impeachment were underway.
“It’s very clear that you had a violent mob
that attacked the Capitol, hunting for the vice president and speaker Pelosi
and legislators, and that attack resulted in multiple deaths and Donald Trump
incited that attack,” Lieu told me. “It’s not a complicated story with a lot of
characters that the American people have never heard of, or can’t even
pronounce their names. It’s a very straightforward narrative that Donald Trump
incited violence to maintain power by any means necessary, and people
died.”
But while Democrats do see a difference
between the impeachments, DeGette stressed the connective tissue between them.
“Donald Trump has flaunted the duties of the president from day one, and while
his effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden seems a little more subtle,
it’s really part and parcel of his whole approach, which is sort of a mob-type
approach: ‘I need to get reelected, so how can I get reelected? Oh, well, I’ll
discredit my opponent by having a foreign government investigate. Oh, well,
I’ll just have, I’ll just call the secretary of state in Georgia and lean on
him to find me some votes,’” DeGette, who was in the House gallery at the time
of the attack, said. “Then of course the ultimate was inciting the riot that
came up to the Hill to try to prevent the certification…. He operates like a
criminal, and this latest was just the final straw.”
Swalwell, another impeachment manager, got texts from the wife
of Congressman Ruben Gallego as news of the Capitol breach
broke. She knew her husband, a military veteran, would look to stay on the
House floor and she wanted Swalwell’s help making sure he would leave. (Gallego
ended up being instrumental in helping people put on their gas masks. “This
isn’t like reading the morning paper. Like, I don’t do this every day,”
Swalwell said of the experience.) He wrangled Gallego off the floor and made it
to a secure location. “That’s where it just all kind of started to set in and I
processed that our president incited our citizens to attack our Capitol—and not
just any day—a day where we were supposed to be counting the Electoral College
vote,” Swalwell told me. He felt his priority was to get back to the
floor. “We didn’t want to be bullied out of there. We wanted to show, you
know, ourselves and the country that we can reclaim it and get back to work.”
Neguse, who talked for hours with Swalwell about this as they waited for law enforcement
to secure the Capitol, felt the same—they had to get back to the floor “that
night.” “We needed to send a signal to not just Americans, but also to our
allies, to the rest of the world, that American democracy, that our
constitutional Republic, would endure.” At roughly 9 p.m., the House
reconvened. Hours later, after 3 a.m. on January 7, lawmakers certified Joe
Biden’s Electoral College victory.
As the dust on Capitol Hill settled, the effort to impeach
Donald Trump began in haste. The article of impeachment that germinated in
Cicilline’s Rayburn office during the siege was introduced on January 11. Two
days later, in a vote of 232 to 197, Trump was impeached on a single article
of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.” Ten House
Republicans voted to impeach.
The team of impeachment managers has been
fairly quiet—on something of a self-imposed media slowdown as the Biden
administration focuses on passing a COVID-19 relief package. But they have been
working day in and day out. “This is the president, in his own words and actions,
inciting people to an attempted coup, to keep him as president of the United
States and falsely claiming that the election was unfair and that it was stolen
from him and his supporters,” Castro told me. “That’s the kind of thing that
we’ve seen for generations in other parts of the world. And it’s been the
United States that will often work with countries to try to help them stabilize
their democracies and get back to the rule of law. That’s what I see; this is
part of that process for us, making sure that we respect the rule of law and
show that no one is above the law, including the president of the United
States.”
Leading the team is Raskin, whose trauma has
been particularly acute. His son passed away on New Year’s Eve and he buried
him on January 5. Raskin’s daughter Tabitha asked him not to
go to work the next day, but he explained that it was his
duty and offered that she accompany him, along with her brother-in-law, to
the vote to certify Biden’s Electoral College victory. They ended up trapped
for hours just off the House floor in Majority Leader Hoyer’s office, behind a
barricaded door rioters sought to break down. “I was most anxious for their
safety,” Raskin told me, describing his frantic efforts to get them out.
“Pelosi and he are often known to quote Thomas Paine, ‘the times have found
us,’” Dean said of Raskin. “My God, the times have found Jamie Raskin.”
When Pelosi approached Raskin to serve as lead
impeachment manager, he described her as solemn and supportive; she wanted to
make sure his family would be okay with it. “The thought that went through my
mind was, I’m not going to lose my son in 2020 and my country in 2021. And I
told her that I would do it.”
The Trump defense team and many Republican
senators have coalesced around the argument that it is unconstitutional to
impeach an official who has already left office—(despite a precedent of such)—and have
largely sought to dodge his unfounded claims of election fraud and his heated
rhetoric in the weeks leading up to the Capitol siege. An effort to dismiss the
Senate trial as unconstitutional was knocked down in a narrow vote of
55 to 45—suggesting that even as Republican leaders including Mitch
McConnell have signaled a desire to free the party of Trump, they are
not yet ready to fully purge Trumpism from its bloodstream.
With 17 Republicans needed to convict, the
odds are in Trump’s favor. But Democrats are pushing ahead with their effort,
regardless. “This president has set himself against the constitution, he has
been impeached twice and now is the time for 100 senators to live up to their
oath as senators, but also their oaths that they will swear as jurors,” Raskin
said. “We are asking for them to closely scrutinize the facts of these events
and we are going to tell them a story which we think leads inexorably and
irresistibly to one conclusion, which is that the president incited this
violent insurrection against the Congress and the people.”
