Trump's Attorneys Ignored the Evidence and Resorted to Lying

 

A prior post bemoaned the complicity of far too many attorneys in the misrule of the Trump/Pence regime and ultimately the failed insurrection on January 6, 2021. Two such attorneys took the stage today, if you will, as they offered up a deceptive defense of Trump and, in my opinion lied sufficiently to deserve disbarment. Hopefully, they got their pieces of silver upfront given Trump's reputation for failing to pay creditors and attorneys.  One has to wonder, assuming they received payment, how much it took to have these individuals prostitute themselves in the eyes of history as they, in my opinion, lied and sought to divert from the evidence all of us witnessed on January 6th and immediately thereafter and again during the impeachment managers presentation. A op-ed in the Washington Post by George Conway, a Trump nemesis looks at this showcase of attorney self-debasement.  Here are highlights:

What former president Donald Trump’s lawyers offered on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Friday was an attack — a misleading, distortive, gaslighting, repetitive, irrelevant and, at times, absurd although mercifully brief — attack. It was an attack on the House impeachment managers, on Democrats, on the impeachment process. It was an attack on everything but the evidence against Trump.

It was a disgrace, like the man it failed to defend.

It was a political screed, fit for One America News, and certainly welcomed by the audience of one in Palm Beach. The impeachment article “slanderously” attacked Trump. The impeachment was another “politically motivated witch hunt” that “divides our nation,” stands in the way of “unity and healing,” “cool temperatures” and “calm passions,” and renders the nation unable to “rise above partisan lines.”

This from the lawyers whose client has to this day never conceded an election he lost by 7,060,115 votes, and who mendaciously claimed on Jan. 6 that his “election victory” had been “stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats.”

The “defense,” such as it was, rested on a single principal factual assertion: that Trump had spoken, exactly once, of “peaceful and patriotic protest” — during an 11,000-word speech. Never mind the rest of the speech. Never mind the weeks of “Stop the Steal” incitement that preceded it. Never mind Trump’s summoning his followers to the capital for a “wild” time on Jan. 6. Never mind the years-long record of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.

There were falsehoods, befitting the client they represented. What happened on Jan. 6 actually wasn’t an insurrection, said one Trump lawyer who apparently lacks a dictionary, which defines the word as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”

False equivalences? There were almost too many to count. Others have used over-the-top rhetoric in the past, trumpeted Trump’s lawyers . . . The same whataboutist clips were played, over and over again, to the point of tedium and farce. They might as well have been Sean Hannity mixtapes, as Jake Tapper aptly put it on CNN. Black Lives Matter protests! Antifa! The president’s lawyers decried the managers’ supposedly misleading video-editing; then they spliced individual words together, dozens upon dozens, all out of context.

To any thinking person, the Trump lawyers didn’t make a dent in the managers’ case. And they couldn’t. Because the managers presented three overwhelming cases in one. The first is the pre-Jan. 6 case: How Trump relentlessly peddled the Big Lie: that he won the election, by a lot. How he tried to pressure election officials to manufacture votes for him. Those, by themselves, could have sufficed as impeachable offenses, given the president’s sworn duty to uphold the law and the Constitution.

The second is Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. Viewed in the context of all that preceded and surrounded it, this likewise warrants conviction beyond any doubt.

The third, equally damning, is Trump’s dereliction of duty later that day. Instead of vigorously condemning the violence the way he condemned the supposed “steal,” Trump enjoyed the televised spectacle, trashed his vice president, issued half-hearted tweets, expressed “love” for the insurrectionists, and exclaimed, “Remember this day forever!”

And as to each of these offenses, Trump’s lawyers ignored the law. Yes, it’s the Constitution that applies here, but not the First Amendment, as they repeatedly asserted. It’s the president’s constitutional duty under Article II, which first and foremost is to sustain democracy, not destroy it. As Raskin put it on Thursday, “What is impeachable conduct, if not this?”

The Trump lawyers offered no answer, because there is none.