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Trump’s impeachment trial starts with graphic Capitol assault footage – video
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The historic second impeachment trial of Donald Trump began in the US Senate on Tuesday, with the former president facing a charge of “incitement of insurrection” after his supporters stormed the US Capitol last month and engaged in violent clashes that left five people dead.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York, opened the trial by saying it focused on “the gravest charges ever brought against a president of the United States in American history”.
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Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager – essentially a prosecutor sent by the US House during the trial – began by showing brutal video footage of pro-Trump rioters storming the Capitol on 6 January.
The video opened with Trump’s speech to thousands of supporters, in which he falsely asserted that the November election had been “stolen” and goaded the crowd to march on the Capitol to “stop the steal”.
The reel spliced together several striking scenes of violence and mayhem, showing members of the mob raiding and ransacking the US Capitol. It painted a picture of a sitting president of the United States encouraging supporters to attack the seat of the US government.
The final image was a tweet sent by Trump that evening, in which he wrote: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
“You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our constitution? That’s a high crime and misdemeanor,” Raskin said after the video concluded. “If that’s not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing.”
The video began several hours of debate on whether Trump could even be tried because he has left office.
The Democratic managers argued that there must be no “January exception” for presidents to escape punishment for their actions as they prepare to leave office. Citing the writings of America’s founding fathers, as well as contemporary constitutional scholars, they said allowing Trump to avoid accountability would set a dangerous precedent.
Congressman Joe Neguse, a Democrat of Colorado and another impeachment manager, called 6 January “the framers’ worst nightmare come to life”.
“Presidents can’t inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened,” he added.
In a winding and freewheeling rebuttal, Trump’s lawyer Bruce Castor eventually made the point that the former president’s rhetoric was protected under the first amendment.
“We can’t possibly be suggesting that we punish people for political speech in this country,” Castor told the senators, before claiming that the only reason the impeachment trial was happening was because lawmakers feared Trump as an opponent in 2024.
The trial, which is expected to last a week or more, is set to strike a sharp contrast of tone with Trump’s first trial in early 2020, at which prosecutors used documents, emails and testimony to tell a complicated story about a Trump pressure campaign in Ukraine.
This time the alleged crime scene is much closer to home – in the very chamber where the trial began to play out on Tuesday, which was invaded by Trump supporters moments after members of Congress and staff had been evacuated on that day in January.
Concluding Democrats’ opening arguments, Raskin’s voice quivered as he offered a raw and deeply personal reflection of what he experienced in the House chamber on 6 January, the day after he buried his son, who had taken his own life in December. The grieving father had brought his daughter and son-in-law to the Capitol, eager for them to witness the peaceful transfer of power.
They were separated in the mayhem, and as he sought to ensure their safety listened as his colleagues called family members and sent what they feared were final texts to loved ones. Pausing to collect himself, Raskin recounted his reunion, when he daughter told him she never wanted to return to the Capitol again.
“Senators, this cannot be our future,” he pleaded through tears. “This cannot be the future of America.”
With a majority of Americans expressing horror and outrage at the attack on the Capitol, the allegations against Trump could land much more powerfully with the public than did the story of his seeking political favors from Ukraine in return for official acts.
Seeking to defuse the incendiary potential of the evidence that Democrats are preparing to air on the Senate floor, defense lawyers for Trump on Monday made the extraordinary claim that presenting the events of the attack would amount to “a brazen attempt to glorify violence”.
Trump’s defense team, led by Bruce Castor, a former county prosecutor from Pennsylvania, also argued in a legal brief that the Senate does not have jurisdiction to try Trump, because he has already left office. Additionally they claimed that Trump’s speeches and tweets whipping up a frenzy about false election fraud did not amount to incitement and were protected under the first amendment.
The impeachment managers filed a blistering response to that argument on Tuesday.
“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,” they wrote in a rebuttal brief.
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The core of the prosecution’s argument, laid out in an 80-page brief submitted last week, documents statements Trump made and tweeted, from “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” to “Election Rigged & Stolen” to “they’re not taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell, I’ll tell you right now” to “So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!”
Dozens of the nearly 140 people who have been charged so far in relation with the Capitol attack have argued as part of their criminal defenses that they stormed the building because the president told them to.
Leaders from both parties are seen as not wanting this trial to run as long as the previous impeachment trial, which stretched to 15 days over January and February last year.
An early push by Democrats to call witnesses at the current trial, possibly including police officers who were injured in the attack, lost momentum out of concerns that a longer timeline could interrupt efforts by the Joe Biden administration to pass a $1.9tn Covid-19 aid and economic relief package into law and pursue other policy initiatives.
Each side will have up to 16 hours starting at noon on Wednesday to make their cases.
Unlike at his first impeachment trial, Trump is at risk this time of suffering multiple defections by Republican senators outraged by the threat to their personal safety and dreaming, perhaps, of a long-shot opportunity to jettison Trump from core conservative politics.
But 17 Republicans would need to join Democrats to convict Trump and then bar him from holding office in the future – a tally that appears all but unattainable.
Trump is the only president in US history to be impeached twice. There have been impeachment proceedings against three other presidents: Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson. None was convicted at trial.
In 2019, Trump was impeached in the House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but he was acquitted in the Senate in 2020 with only one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, voting to convict.
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