Al Jazeera :
With former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial set to begin next week, he faces a Tuesday deadline to respond to the US House’s article of impeachment charging him with inciting an insurrection.
Tuesday’s filing will be the first public road map of Trump’s defence following a late shake-up of his legal team. Over the weekend, Trump hired two new lawyers after a reported dispute with his initial lawyers over how to defend the charge that he urged a mob of his supporters gathered in Washington, DC, on January 6 to storm the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s November 3 election victory. The riot left five people dead.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of Trump’s recently-hired lawyers, David Schoen, said he is not planning to argue that Trump lost the election because of fraud, as Trump has repeatedly insisted, and would instead argue that the trial itself is unconstitutional since Trump has already left office and that his words were protected by the First Amendment and did not incite a riot.
Republican Senator John Cornyn – one of the 100 members of the Senate who will serve as jurors in Trump’s second impeachment trial – agreed that focusing on claims of election fraud would be “really not material” to the incitement charge.
“I think it would be a disservice to the president’s own defence to get bogged down in things that really aren’t before the Senate,” Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court judge, told reporters on Monday.
Schoen also appeared on Fox News on Monday, calling the case needlessly divisive and undemocratic and said it is “the most ill-advised legislative action that I’ve seen in my lifetime”. Impeachment, Schoen said, “is the weapon they’ve tried to use against him”.
Trump is the first president in American history to be impeached twice. He was acquitted at a Senate trial last year over his contacts with his Ukrainian counterpart.
In addition to Trump’s deadline, the nine House Democrats serving as impeachment managers – essentially the prosecutors of the case – need to file their initial briefs on Tuesday, before the beginning of the trial next week.
House Democrats plan to lay out what happened on January 6 in graphic detail – an effort to get through to Senate Republicans who have largely avoided talking about the attack itself and Trump’s role in it, instead focusing on the process of the impeachment trial. They are expected to play videos and verbally recount the violence of the day in hopes of stirring the Republicans, most of whom fled the Senate that day as the rioters broke in.
The nine House impeachment managers who will argue the case also are expected to lay out how they believe Trump’s actions over the previous several months led up to it and eventually incited the insurrectionists to act.
