If you watch the chyrons over at Fox News, you will know that the “unethical, unconstitutional sham impeachment” trial is going forward next week. Impeachment II is going to look very different from Impeachment I. For all of the bluster about “unethical” and “unconstitutional” there must be some reason why not one single lawyer from the original defense team, not even Alan Dershowitz, amazingly, wants to go back into combat one more time.
You recall how last time, Jay Sekulow, Pam Bondi, Pat Cipollone, Deputy White House Counsels Pat Philbin and Eric Herschmann and Dershowitz were all on board to defend Trump. Now you won’t find one of these people. Constitutional law expert Johnathan Turley was also offered the gig and he didn’t want any part of it, either. Must be a reason, right? Could that reason possibly be that nobody besides the Fox News chyron maker wants to attempt to defend Donald Trump’s standing behind the presidential seal and inciting a riot? And that’s why he’s left with Jeffrey Epstein lawyer David Shoen, and Bruce Castor the ex-Pennsylvania Attorney General who declined to prosecute subsequently convicted rapist Bill Cosby? The Independent:
“They’re basically making what I would call the ‘Citizen Trump’ defense — he’s a private citizen, so you can’t do anything to prevent him from engaging in another coup like this… and he has all the free speech rights of a private citizen. But of course, he wasn’t a private citizen, he was speaking from behind the presidential seal, he was speaking with all the power and authority of a president. And you can’t take the oath as president and have all that power and none of the responsibility,” Tribe said. “You can’t take an oath as president of the United States, and then urge people to burn down the Capitol.”
And it gets more ludicrous, still. If the Democrats dare to present “evidence” we are told by Lindsey Graham and Jason Miller, boy, look out, we’re really going to get it then.
One of Trump’s closest allies in the upper chamber, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, said on Monday during a Fox News appearance that if Democrats call even a single witness, it would be opening “Pandora’s box”. It would be inappropriate, he added, because of a House process that he slammed as an “affront to the presidency and due process” since Democrats impeached Trump in part based on a speech he delivered as president, and did so without holding hearings.
“If you open that can of worms, we’ll want the FBI to come in and tell us about how people pre-planned this attack and what happened with the security footprint at the Capitol,” Graham said.
For his part, [law professor Frank] Bowman called Graham’s threat “a joke.”
“Lindsey Graham is yammering about how they’re gonna drag this out until hell freezes over? Come on,” he said. “The idea that Republican Senators want the attention of the country for even the next minute to be on what happened between November 4th and January 6th is complete fantasy.” […]
Like Graham, [Jason] Miller also threatened retaliation if Democrats use Trump’s words against him.
“If they’re going to go after one individual, try to change the constitution to do that, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to put the Democrats on trial. We’re going to put Chuck Schumer, we’re going to put Nancy Pelosi, we’re going to go and put Maxine Waters, we’re going to put them on trial next week, and the country and the entire world is going to see just how frivolous and vindictive the Democratic Party is,” he said.
But according to Bowman, such a threat is just more evidence of the weakness of Trump’s defense: “Anytime they start saying, ‘Oh, we’re… gonna beat up on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi,’ you pretty much know that they’re basically giving up on winning on substance… They’ve got nothing to say about the merits, so they’ve got to talk about something else.”
As stated, they got nothin.’ They’ve got two lawyers to stand up there and go through the motions on television and that’s about the size of it. And that right there is a problem.
One former Trump White House official who served during the first trial predicted that Trump will need to “bulk up” his current team if he wishes to avoid embarrassment.
“You can’t do an impeachment on the floor of the Senate with two f**king lawyers,” he said, before noting that even some of Trump’s most avid television defenders — including Dershowitz and George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley — are among those who’ve declined requests to participate in next week’s trial.
Finally, for Graham and Miller to argue against the presentation of witnesses or testimony at any trial, let alone one of this gravity, is so farcical as to not even be worthy to dignify with further comment.
As always, they’re trying to put on a good show for the base and as always, the grifting machine is oiled and running.
Next week another intriguing chapter in American history will be written.
I do love the logic of the ‘defence’:
1: You can’t impeach him because he’s not president any more (overlooking the fact that he was actually impeached while he still held the position. It’s the trial that’s still to happen).
2: He really won the election and was trying to stop it being stolen
Now, in the case of #1: You may as well claim that no-one can be tried in court if they’re not in the job they had when they committed and were charged with the offence and in case #2, it actually negates case #1
There is, of course, NO reasonable defense to any of the shitgibbon’s actions over the last year of mega-deaths from the Trump virus … time and again, his stupidity floats to the top of a situation of failed leadership in the WH …
His world of smoke screens and distortion mirrors like in the funhouses, has produced NOTHING in the interest of our general population, only primarily himself, and secondarily, the 1% stupendously wealthy oligarchs in our country and others by default of, “super deals”, by the least competent person EVER to besmirch the sacred halls of our WH and Capitol …
Beginning opening statement of the lawyers for Trump:
Although millions of people saw and heard Mr. Trump say the things listed in his charges today, from a amplified podium microphone on national television and online over millions of miles of monitored web traffic by a majority of stuck-at-home citizens who, because of his major failure to prevent the spread of the, “Chyna”, disease, he is innocent of any charges brought today, simply because he is no-longer the president … umm, there, umm, you have it, no way our fearless leader should be charged with any crime …
As a Dem manager clears his thoughts for a second, he walks up to the podium and says, “is that the only bs you could come up with?” After another moment, he says, Mr. Trump was impeached days ago, while still a so-called president, now let’s get to work, we have 40 witnesses and a ream of paper records of his guilt …
What are they going to defend. That trump didn’t actually go with them like he said.
And I do hope that they at least expose everyone connected to this. That includes members of Congress that aided the rioters and the members of Congress that voted to change the outcome of the election. If they just voted to change the election is one thing but many either encouraged or enabled the rioters. It’s time that Democrats stand up for our country and set the record straight on our constitution and Democracy.
Um, that first blockquote from the Independent raises a question as to who exactly is thinking this:
“he’s a private citizen, so you can’t do anything to prevent him from engaging in another coup like this… and he has all the free speech rights of a private citizen.”
There cannot possibly be a lawyer who would believe any citizen, “private” or otherwise, cannot be prevented from “engaging in a[nother] coup.” Even “free speech rights” do NOT permit such. The Constitution guarantee to free speech does NOT protect the advocacy of a “violent overthrow of the government” (which is largely what a coup generally entails).