WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump's impeachment lawyers accused Democrats of waging a campaign of "hatred" against the former president as they sped through their defense of his actions and words before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, hurtling the Senate toward a final vote in the historic trial.
The defense team denied on Friday that Trump had incited the deadly riot and said his encouragement of followers to "fight like hell" at a rally that preceded it was routine political speech.
A montage of video clips played by the Trump team showed nearly every Democratic senator as well as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris using the word "fight" or the phrase "fight like hell" just as Trump did at a rally of supporters on Jan. 6 just before the siege of the Capitol.
"Suddenly, the word 'fight' is off limits?" said Michael van der Veen, one of the lawyers hired in recent days to defend Trump. "Spare us the hypocrisy and false indignation. It's a term that's used over and over and over again by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And, of course, the Democrat House managers know that the word 'fight' has been used figuratively in political speech forever."
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73a2JRTTm0]
The case is speeding toward a vote and likely acquittal, perhaps as soon as today, with the Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and a two-thirds majority required for conviction. Trump's lawyers made an abbreviated presentation that used less than three of their allotted 16 hours.
Their quick pivot to the Democrats' own words deflected from the central question of the trial -- whether Trump incited the assault on the Capitol -- and instead aimed to place impeachment managers and Trump adversaries on the defensive.
His lawyers contended he was merely telling his rally crowd to support primary challenges against his adversaries and to press for sweeping election changes.
After a two-day effort by Democrats to sync up Trump's words to the violence that followed, including through video footage, defense lawyers suggested that Democrats have typically engaged in the same overheated rhetoric as Trump.
The defenders minimized Trump's monthslong efforts to undermine the election results and his urging of followers to do the same. Democrats say that long campaign, rooted in a "big lie," laid the groundwork for the mob that assembled outside the Capitol and stormed inside. Five people died.
"And so they came, draped in Trump's flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Rep. Madeleine Dean, one of the impeachment managers, said Thursday.
On Friday, as defense lawyers repeated their own videos, some Democrats chuckled and whispered among themselves as many of their faces flashed on the screen. Some passed notes. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal threw up his hands, apparently amused, when his face appeared. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar rolled her eyes. Most Republicans watched intently.
During a break, some joked about the videos and others said they were a distraction or a "false equivalence" with Trump's behavior.
"Well, we heard the word 'fight' a lot," said Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett said it felt like the lawyers were "erecting straw men to then take them down rather than deal with the facts."
"Show me any time that the result was that one of our supporters pulled someone out of the crowd, and then we said, 'That's great, good for you,'" said Delaware Sen. Chris Coons.
Trump's defenders told senators that Trump was entitled to dispute the 2020 election results and that his doing so did not amount to inciting the violence. They sought to turn the tables on prosecutors by likening the Democrats' questioning of the legitimacy of Trump's 2016 win to his challenge of his election loss.
The defense team did not dispute the horror of the violence, reconstructed by impeachment managers earlier in the week, but said it had been carried out by people who had "hijacked" what was supposed to be a peaceful event and had planned violence before Trump had spoken.
"You can't incite what was going to happen," he said.
Senate Democrats dismissed the defense's efforts to equate Trump's actions with Democratic speeches. "They're trying to draw a dangerous and distorted equivalence," Blumenthal told reporters during a break in the trial. "I think it is plainly a distraction from Donald Trump inviting the mob to Washington."
[Gallery not loading above? Click here for more photos » arkansasonline.com/213dc/]
"They really didn't address the facts of the case at all," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. and the lead impeachment manager. "There were a couple propaganda reels about Democratic politicians that would be excluded in any court in the land. They talk about the rules of evidence -- all of that was totally irrelevant to the case before us."
But for Republicans, the defense was more than enough. "The president's lawyers blew the House managers' case out of the water," said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
Even Murkowski, who called on Trump to resign after the Capitol siege, said the defense team was "more on their game" than during the trial's opening day this week.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
After the Trump team's abbreviated defense, the senators posed their own questions, generally using their queries to score political points and prompting the former president's prosecutors and defenders to respond to arguments by the other camp.
The questions, 28 submitted in writing and read by a clerk, suggested that most Republicans remained likely to vote to acquit Trump when the Senate reconvenes for final arguments at 10 a.m. today, blocking the two-thirds supermajority required by the Constitution for conviction.
[DOCUMENT: Democratic legal brief » arkansasonline.com/22bri/]
Some of the few Republicans thought to be open to conviction, including Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Murkowski, peppered the lawyers with questions about what Trump knew and when he knew it during the attack. The managers have argued that it was not just the president's words and actions in advance of the attack that betrayed his oath, but his failure to act more assertively to stop his supporters after it started.
Responding to the senators, the defense lawyers pointed to messages and a video that Trump posted on Twitter after the building was stormed calling on his supporters not to use violence while still endorsing their cause and telling them that he loved them. The managers repeated that Trump never made a strong, explicit call on the rioters to halt the attack, nor did he send help.
Romney and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., zeroed in on Trump's failure to exhibit any concern over the safety of his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was targeted by the former president's supporters because he refused to try to block finalization of the election. Even after Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber that day, Trump attacked him on Twitter, saying that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done."
Van der Veen told the senators that "at no point was the president informed that the vice president was in any danger." But in fact, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told reporters this week that he spoke by telephone with Trump during the attack and told him that Pence had been rushed out of the chamber to protect him from the mob. And officials have said that Trump never called Pence to check on his safety and did not speak with him for days.
[DOCUMENT: Articles of impeachment against President Trump » arkansasonline.com/impeach2/]
VIDEO OF RIOTERS
Anticipating defense efforts to disentangle Trump's rhetoric from the rioters' actions, the impeachment managers spent days trying to fuse them together through a reconstruction of never-before-seen video footage alongside clips of the president's months of urging his supporters to undo the election results.
On Thursday, they described in stark, personal terms the terror they faced that January day. They used security video of rioters searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Pence, smashing into the building and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police.
Though defense lawyers sought to boil down the case to a single Trump speech, Democrats displayed the many public and explicit instructions he gave his supporters well before the White House rally that unleashed the deadly Capitol attack as Congress was certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory. And they used the rioters' own videos and words from Jan. 6 to try to pin responsibility on Trump. "We were invited here," said one Capitol invader. "Trump sent us," said another. "He'll be happy. We're fighting for Trump."
The prosecutors' goal was to cast Trump not as a bystander but rather as the "inciter in chief" who spread election falsehoods, then encouraged supporters to challenge the results in Washington.
The Democrats also are demanding that he be barred from holding future federal office.
[DOCUMENT: Transcript of President Trump's Jan. 6 speech » arkansasonline.com/jan6trump/]
Trump's lawyers say that goal only underscores the "hatred" Democrats feel for Trump. Throughout the trial, they showed clips from Democrats questioning the legitimacy of his presidency and suggesting as early as 2017 that he should be impeached.
"Hatred is at the heart of the house managers' fruitless attempts to blame Donald Trump for the criminal acts of the rioters -- based on double hearsay statements of fringe right-wing groups, based on no real evidence other than rank speculation," van der Veen said.
Trump's lawyers noted that in the same Jan. 6 speech he encouraged the crowd to behave "peacefully," and they contend that his remarks -- and his general distrust of the election results -- are all protected under the First Amendment. Democrats resist that assertion, saying his words weren't political speech but rather amounted to direct incitement of violence.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press; and by Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.
