Impeachment managers equate team Trump’s trial strategy with defending a Nazi ‘in a white hood’
The House impeachment managers on Tuesday compared the legal arguments offered by Donald Trump’s trial lawyers to a strategy that would be used to defend a president who appeared at a Ku Klux Klan rally “in a white hood” or “wore a swastika while leading a march through a Jewish neighborhood.”
The nine Democratic managers drew the harsh parallel in a memo responding to a claim from Trump’s legal team that the Senate should not convict the former president of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol because his incendiary speech before the siege was protected by the First Amendment.
“Accepting President Trump’s argument would mean that Congress could not impeach a president who burned an American flag on national television, or who spoke at a Ku Klux Klan rally in a white hood, or who wore a swastika while leading a march through a Jewish neighborhood — all of which is expression protected by the First Amendment but would obviously be grounds for impeachment,” the managers wrote in the 31-page memo.
The Democrats, who are spearheaded by lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said the First Amendment is not designed to “limit the Senate’s power to protect the nation from an unfit leader.”
“And even assuming the First Amendment applied, it would certainly not protect President Trump’s speech on January 6, which incited lawless action,” they added.
Trump’s lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor, argued in their trial memo Monday that the ex-president was only speaking in “the figurative sense” when he told thousands of supporters outside the White House to “fight like hell” to stop the congressional certification of President Biden’s election on Jan. 6, prompting many of them to storm the Capitol in a chilling attack on democracy that left a police officer and four others dead.
Castor and Schoen separately argued that the impeachment trial itself is unconstitutional because they say the Constitution only allows the Senate to try current presidents.
The House managers said that claim was bull as well.
“In more than 200 years, the Senate has never accepted the self-defeating argument that it lacks the power to try the impeachment of a former official,” the managers wrote, noting that President Ulysses Grant’s war secretary actually faced impeachment trial after resigning in 1876. “The Senate should not do so for the first time now.”
Democrats hope that by convicting Trump of instigating the Jan. 6 riot, the Senate could separately vote to bar him from ever again holding or running for public office.
