Lawyers to former US President Donald Trump failed on Tuesday to stop his second impeachment trial, the first ever in the country’s history.
After legal arguments from the lawyers and impeachment managers and graphic video, U.S. senators voted to move forward with the trial on a charge of inciting the deadly assault on the Capitol on 6 June.
The senators rejected 56-44 the Trump lawyers claim that the proceeding was unconstitutional, since Trump had left office.
Democrats hope to disqualify Trump from ever again holding public office. Six Republicans voted in support of the trial.
The video presented by the team of nine House of Representatives Democrats interspersed images of the January Capitol violence with clips of Trump’s incendiary speech to a crowd of supporters moments earlier urging them to “fight like hell” to overturn his Nov. 3 election defeat.
Senators, serving as jurors, watched as screens showed Trump’s followers throwing down barriers and hitting police officers at the Capitol. The video also included the moment when police guarding the House chamber fatally shot protester Ashli Babbitt, one of five people including a police officer who died in the rampage.
The mob attacked police, sent lawmakers scrambling for safety and interrupted the formal congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory after Trump had spent two months challenging the election results based on false claims of widespread voting fraud.
“If that’s not an impeachment offence, then there is no such thing,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who led the prosecution, told the assembled senators after showing the video.
He wept as he recounted how relatives he brought to the Capitol that day to witness the election certification had to shelter in an office near the House floor, saying: “They thought they were going to die.”
In contrast to the Democrats’ emotional presentation, Trump’s lawyers attacked the process, arguing that the proceeding was an unconstitutional, partisan effort to close off Trump’s political future even after he had already departed the White House.
“What they really want to accomplish here in the name of the Constitution is to bar Donald Trump from ever running for political office again, but this is an affront to the Constitution no matter who they target today,” David Schoen, one of Trump’s lawyers, told senators.
He denounced the “insatiable lust for impeachment” among Democrats before airing his own video, which stitched together clips of various Democratic lawmakers calling for Trump’s impeachment going back to 2017.
CONVICTION UNLIKELY
Finding him guilty would require a two-thirds majority, meaning that at least 17 Republicans would need to join the Senate’s 48 Democrats and two independents in voting against Trump, who remains his party’s most powerful figure even out of office.
Trump is the only president to go on trial in the Senate after leaving office and the only one to be impeached twice. He is just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached at all.
The trial was held with extraordinary security around the Capitol following the siege, including armed security forces and a perimeter of fencing and razor wire.
One year ago, the then-Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump on charges of obstructing Congress and abuse of power for pressuring Ukraine to launch an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter in 2019.
