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PBS NewsHour: “Debate over one of their own opens new fault lines in Republican ranks” “The U.S. House of Representatives spent hours on Thursday in impassioned debate over the future of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her past statements espousing support for conspiracy theories and violence against lawmakers.”
Wall Street Journal: “Jamie Raskin Leads Democrats in Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial” “Rep. Jamie Raskin faces an immediate challenge as the top prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump: Many of the senators acting as jurors don’t think there should be one.”
Feb 8, 2021 11:48 AM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) Lawyers for Donald Trump on Monday blasted the impeachment case against him as an act of “political theater” as they accused House Democrats of exploiting the chaos and trauma of last month’s riot at the U.S. Capitol for their party’s gain.
In a brief filed on the eve of the impeachment trial, lawyers for the former president leveled a wide-ranging attack on the case, foreshadowing the claims they intend to present when arguments begin Tuesday on the same Senate floor that was invaded by rioters on Jan. 6.
They suggest that Trump was simply exercising his First Amendment rights when he disputed the election results and argue that he explicitly encouraged his supporters to have a peaceful protest and therefore cannot be responsible for the actions of the rioters. They say the Senate is not entitled to try Trump now that he has left office, an argument contested by even some conservative legal scholar
1. They illogically argue that House Dems
supported violence at the Capitol, while
Republicans looked on in horror.
See if you can follow along with this logic: according to Trump, the House Managers are “glorifying violence” by detailing the specific events of Jan. 6 in their impeachment memo.
In a brazen attempt to further glorify violence, the House Managers took several pages of their Memorandum to restate over 50 sensationalized media reports detailing the horrific incidents and shocking violence of those hours. Counsel for the 45th President hereby stipulate that what happened at the Capitol by those criminals was horrible and horrific in every sense of those words.
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 One year after his first impeachment, former president Donald Trump finds himself the subject of an unprecedented second trial beginning Tuesday in the Senate, whose members must determine whether he incited a deadly assault on the US Capitol. The 100 senators will also step.
The US Senate voted 55-45 on Tuesday to block a Republican effort to upend plans for former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial on a charge that he incited the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol.