Trump’s Lawyers Repeated Inaccurate Claims in
Impeachment Trial
The three members of the
former president’s legal team made a number of misleading or false claims about
the events of Jan. 6, antifa, the impeachment process and voter fraud.
By Linda Qiu
- Feb. 12, 2021Updated 7:52
p.m. ET
As they mounted
their defense of
the former president on Friday, Donald
J. Trump’s lawyers made
a number of inaccurate or misleading claims about the Jan. 6 riot at the
Capitol, Mr. Trump’s remarks, the impeachment process and 2020 election. Many
claims were echoes of right-wing talking points popularized on social media or
ones that were spread by Mr. Trump himself.
Here’s a fact check.
Mr.
Trump’s lawyers were misleading about what happened on Jan. 6.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“Instead of expressing a desire that the joint
session be prevented from conducting its business, the entire premise of his
remarks was that the democratic process would and should play out according to
the letter of the law.” — Michael van der Veen, lawyer for Mr. Trump
False. In his speech
on Jan. 6 and
before, Mr. Trump repeatedly urged former Vice President Mike Pence to reject
the certification of the Electoral College votes, saying Mr. Pence should “send
it back to the States to recertify.” Mr. Trump continued his speech on Jan. 6
saying he was “challenging the certification of the election.”
WHAT
WAS SAID
“Far
from promoting insurrection of the United States, the president’s remarks
explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully
and patriotically.” — Mr. van der Veen
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump used
the phrase “peacefully and patriotically” once in his speech, compared with 20
uses of the word “fight.”
WHAT
WAS SAID
“As everyone knows, the president had spoken
at hundreds of large rallies across the country over the past five years. There
had never been any moblike or riotous behaviors.” — Mr. van der Veen
This is misleading. While no other Trump
rally has led to a siege of the Capitol, there have been episodes of violence,
sometimes encouraged by the president. Less than two months before the riot on
Jan. 6, Mr. Trump waved
to supporters who
had gathered in Washington to protest his election loss and who later
violently clashed
with counterprotesters. Previously, other supporters had attacked counterprotesters, and in one case a BBC
cameraman,
at several Trump rallies. Mr. Trump called one victim “disgusting” and offered
to pay the legal fees of a supporter who had punched a protester.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“Given the timeline of events, the criminals
at the Capitol weren’t there at the Ellipse to even hear the president’s words.
They were more than a mile away engaged in their preplanned assault on this
very building.” — Bruce L. Castor Jr., another lawyer for Mr. Trump
This
is misleading. It
is true that the Capitol was first breached before Mr.
Trump had concluded his remarks, but this does not rule out the possibility that
some rioters were inspired by his speech. In fact, several have said that they were.
For example, Robert L. Bauer, who had
attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 and entered the Capitol, told law
enforcement that when Mr. Trump told the crowd to march to the Capitol (about 16 minutes into his speech), many heeded those
words. Mr. Bauer “reiterated that he marched to the U.S. Capitol because
President Trump said to do so,” according to a criminal complaint.
Mr. Castor’s reasoning that Mr. Trump
could not have incited the crowd to riot because the siege was preplanned also
ignores an argument
that House managers had made this week: Mr.
Trump had spent months trying to invalidate the results of the election and encouraging
his supporters to act.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“At no point was the president informed the
vice president was in any danger.” — Mr. van der Veen
This is disputed. Comments by Senator Tommy
Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, suggest otherwise. This week, Mr. Tuberville
recounted that he and Mr. Trump had spoken just as the Capitol was breached
before the phone call was cut short.
“I said ‘Mr. President, they just took
the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Mr. Tuberville said.
They
made inaccurate references to antifa, left-wing protests and the 2016 election.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“One of the first people arrested was the
leader of antifa.” — Mr. van der Veen
This is misleading. Mr. van der Veen was
most likely referring to John
E. Sullivan,
a Utah man who was charged on Jan. 14 with violent entry and disorderly
conduct. Mr. Sullivan, an activist, said he was there to film the siege. He had
previously referred to antifa — a
loosely affiliated group of antifascist activists that has no
leader — on social media, but he has repeatedly denied being
a member of the movement.
The F.B.I.
has said there is no evidence that supporters of the antifa
movement had participated in the Capitol siege.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“As
many will recall, last summer the White House was faced with violent rioters
night after night. They repeatedly attacked Secret Service officers, and at one
point pierced a security wall, culminating in the clearing of Lafayette
Square.” — Mr. van der Veen
False. This timeline is wrong. Law
enforcement officials began clearing Lafayette Square after 6 p.m. on June 1 to
allow Mr. Trump to pose
with a Bible in front of a church, not because of a breach. Additional
security barriers were installed after those events, according to local news reports and the National Park Service.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“The entire Democratic Party and national news
media spent the last four years repeating without any evidence that the 2016
election had been hacked.” — Mr. van der Veen
False. United States intelligence
agencies concluded
years ago that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 election. The Republican-led
Senate agreed last
year that Russia had disrupted that election to help Mr. Trump.
They
mischaracterized the impeachment process.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“The House waited to deliver the articles to
the Senate for almost two weeks, only after Democrats had secured control over
the Senate. In fact, contrary to their claim that the only reason they held it
was because Senator McConnell wouldn’t accept the article, Representative
Clyburn made clear they had considered holding the articles for over 100 days
to provide President Biden with a clear pathway to implement his agenda.” —
David I. Schoen, another lawyer for Mr. Trump
This is misleading. Democrats had considered
delivering the article
of impeachment earlier,
but Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the majority leader, precluded
the possibility. In a letter on
Jan. 8, he informed Republican lawmakers that the Senate was in recess and “may
conduct no business until Jan. 19.”
Representative James E. Clyburn,
Democrat of South Carolina, suggested withholding the articles longer after Mr.
McConnell made his timeline known. In an interview with CNN, Mr. Clyburn suggested Mr. McConnell
was “doing what he thinks he needs to do to be disruptive of President Biden,”
but Democrats might respond to that tactical delay with one of their own to
“give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and
running.”
WHAT
WAS SAID
“Our
Constitution and any basic sense of fairness require that every legal process
with significant consequences for a person’s life, including impeachment,
requires due process under the law, which includes fact-finding and the
establishment of a legitimate, evidentiary record. Even last year, it required
investigation by the House. Here, President Trump and his counsel were given no
opportunity to review evidence or question its propriety.” — Mr. Schoen
This is misleading. The point about lack
of “due process” is one that Mr. Trump’s lawyers and supporters had argued
during his first impeachment and one that law scholars have dismissed.
There are no “enforceable rights” to
due process in a House inquiry, and while those rights exist in the Senate
trial, they are limited, said Frank O. Bowman III, a law professor at the
University of Missouri and an expert on impeachment.
“One justice suggested something like
that if it were found that the Senate was deciding cases on a coin flip, that
might violate due process,” Mr. Bowman said. “Anything short of that, basically
court’s not going to get involved.”
Moreover, a senior aide on the House
impeachment team said that the Trump legal team was given the trial material,
including all video and audio footage, before the start of the proceedings.
They
repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims about voter fraud.
WHAT
WAS SAID
“Based on an analysis of publicly available
voter data that the ballot rejection rate in Georgia in 2016 was approximately
6.42 percent, and even though a tremendous amount of new, first-time mail-in
ballots were included in the 2020 count, the Georgia rejection rate in 2020 was
a mere 0.4 of 1 percent, a drop-off from 6.42 percent to 0.4 percent.” — Mr.
Castor
This is misleading. Georgia elections
officials have repeatedly debunked this
claim, which conflates the overall rejection rate for mail-in ballots in 2016
to the rejection rate specifically for signature mismatch in 2020. (Ballots can
also be rejected for arriving late or not having a signature, among other
reasons.)
In 2016, Georgia
rejected about 6.4 percent of all returned mail-in ballots and 0.24 percent of those ballots because of signature-matching issues.
It is unclear what the 0.4 percent refers to, but in both 2018 and 2020,
Georgia rejected 0.15 percent of mail-in ballots because of signature-matching
issues.
WHAT WAS SAID
“President Trump wanted the signature
verification to be done in public. How can a request for signature
verifications to be done in public be a basis for a charge for inciting a
riot?” — Mr. Castor
This is misleading. Contrary to Mr.
Trump’s belief and Mr. Castor’s repetition of it, Georgia does verify
signatures. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state noted that
the state trained officials on signature matching and created a portal that
checked and confirmed voters’ driver’s licenses. In a news
conference last
month debunking Mr. Trump’s claims, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official
in Georgia, explained that the secretary of state’s office also brought in
signature experts to check over 15,000 ballots. They discovered issues with
two, and after further examination, concluded that they were legitimate.
“Shockingly, the disinformation
continues,” Mr. Sterling tweeted during
the trial.