Tag: Trump insurrection

Lindsey Graham caught saying one thing on impeachment to reporters — but then another to Sean Hannity

Sen. Lindsey-Graham (R-SC) got caught talking out of both sides of his mouth after leaving the impeachment trial on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters, Graham advocated for Capitol police to have shot the protesters and killed more of them. 

“I just can’t believe that we could lose the Capitol like that. I got mad. I mean these police officers had every right to use deadly force, they should have used it,” he said.

But when he appeared on Fox News, Graham had a whole other take perfect for Hannity viewers where he blamed Democrats instead. Continue reading.

Republican Senators Joke About Trump’s Deadly Incitement To Rioters

On the second day of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, House managers presented evidence to support the charge of incitement to insurrection on which Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on January 13.

Republican lawmakers are treating the proceedings as a joke, ignoring the evidence of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters that left five dead and deriding the entire thing as a “political stunt.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Wednesday tweeted a video of herself walking toward the Senate chamber for the second day of the trial. Continue reading.

The Memo: New riot footage stuns Trump trial

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Shocking new footage of the Jan. 6 insurrection was presented in the Senate chamber Wednesday, dismantling the idea that the second impeachment trial of former President Trump would produce no fresh information.

The presentation packed an enormous emotional punch. Its impact was visceral, even as most Americans need no reminder of a day that was a low point in the nation’s history.

Clips shown by Democratic impeachment managers revealed Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) narrowly escaping the mob and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) breaking into a run in the Capitol’s halls after apparently being urged to change direction by a police officer.

The officer in question was Eugene Goodman of the Capitol Police, who has already won praise for diverting the mob of Trump supporters away from the Senate chamber at considerable risk to himself. Continue reading.

Conservative breaks down Fox News’ repeated promotion of lies and disinformation

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In the weeks leading up to the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building, opinion hosts at Fox News were more than happy to promote then-President Donald Trump’s bogus and debunked claims of widespread voter fraud. Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in a February 9 column for the Washington Post, slams the right-wing cable news outlet for pushing lies and disinformation in the weeks after the 2020 election — and for continuing to do it.

“Donald Trump is now on trial in the Senate for inciting a violent insurrection, but what about his collaborators?,” Boot writes. “Fox ‘News,’ Newsmax, One American News, and other right-wing outlets relentlessly pushed the ‘Big Lie’ that led to this attack. On January 4, for example, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson accused ‘virtually every power center on Earth’ of working ‘tirelessly.… to bypass voters and get Joe Biden to the White House’…. Where is the accountability for right-wing propagandists like Carlson, who recklessly splashed around the lighter fluid that ignited on January 6?

Fox News is presently facing a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from voting technology provider Smartmatic for promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that its technology was used to help Biden steal the election. The lawsuit specifically mentions Fox News hosts Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo as well as Lou Dobbs, whose show on Fox Business was abruptly canceled last week. Continue reading.

GOP aide’s friends texted her right-wing conspiracy theories as she hid from Capitol rioters

GOP aide Leslie Shedd barricaded herself in her office as pro-Trump rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But as she prayed for her safety, friends were texting her right-wing disinformation as the attack unfolded, according to an account published by VICE.

“As friends and family texted to make sure she was safe, two claimed in separate conversations that the rioters were really left-wing agitators in disguise, not the Trump supporters who’d flocked by the thousands to a rally where the president claimed the election was stolen from him. A third floated a conspiracy theory involving the Capitol Police,” VICE’s Cameron Joseph reports. 

One friend texted Shedd that the people storming the Capitol were really “BLM and antifa people” disguised as Trump supporters.  Continue reading.

New security video shows harrowing details of Capitol attack

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The House Democrats prosecuting former President Trump‘s impeachment case unveiled harrowing new video footage on Wednesday, lending a new glimpse of just how close the rioters came to former Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. senators as they breached the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The new footage, released on the second day of Trump’s Senate trial, takes advantage of Capitol security cameras positioned around the complex, depicting both the violent intentions of the mob and the heroics of several Capitol Police officers, including Eugene Goodman, who diverted the mob away from senators on the chamber floor. 

“This is now effectively a riot.”

The videos are meant to drive home the Democrats’ argument that the former president purposefully stirred up his supporters with claims of a stolen election and then encouraged them to march on the Capitol to block the vote certifying the victory of his opponent, President Biden.  Continue reading.

5 takeaways from Day 4 of Trump’s impeachment trial

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Former president Donald Trump’s legal defense made its presentation Friday at his impeachment trial.

Below are some takeaways.

1. A heavy dose of whataboutism

The early part of the Trump team’s presentation was overwhelmingly focused on things that didn’t involve him. It was almost 100 percent whataboutism.

Democrats over the past three days have played lengthy videos of the insurrection at the Capitol, so Trump’s team played video of the unrest at racial justice protests this summer. Continue reading.

A running tally of Trump’s misleading impeachment defense

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“Contrast the President’s repeated condemnations of violence with the rhetoric from his opponents.”

— Former president Donald Trump’s defense lawyer Michael T. van der Veen, introducing an edited video montage featuring several Democratic lawmakers out of context, Feb. 12

For the past few days, House managers have taken great pains to connect the dots between Trump’s rhetoric leading up and after the deadly Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol. Lawmakers came armed with hours of source video, a barrage of presidential tweets and never-before-seen surveillance video of the attack. Their case to prove Trump indeed incited the violence of Jan. 6 has hinged on the concept that words, and more importantly context, matter.

Trump’s defense team has responded by arguing the House managers took Trump’s remarks out of context — and offered its own series of clips. But these often were taken out of context. Continue reading.

In an avalanche of words, there’s no sign of regret from Trump

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The first day of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump began in silence and dignity. It ended with a tale of grievance and fury told by a team of last-minute lawyers who looked and sounded more than a little worse for wear.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Democratic House managers marched soberly through Statuary Hall and onto the Senate floor. The assembled legislators voted on the rules of the proceedings and then the managers, in their rainbow of tailored gray suits, took to the microphone to analyze, parse and massage a multitude of words focused on interpreting the intent of the Constitution, the mind-set of the former president and the meaning of the noun “person.” They even coined a new phrase for the occasion: January exception.

The House managers spent the bulk of their allotted time explaining precisely why Trump’s impeachment trial was constitutional. And in arguing their case, they quoted from the history books and from modern legal scholars. They appealed to a sense of logic, noting that if a former president could not be held to account by the Senate, then sitting presidents could simply save their most egregious behavior for the final weeks of their administration and then go wild without fear of repercussions. Continue reading.

‘It was inciting,’ ‘provoked by the president’: What GOP senators said before about Trump’s culpability for the Capitol riot

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Republican senators sent their latest signal Tuesday that former president Donald Trump is headed for acquittal in his impeachment trial, with 44 out of 50 of them voting that the Senate doesn’t have jurisdiction to try him. The Republican National Committee followed that up by distributing talking pointsfrom Trump’s legal team.

“Nothing the president said on January 6 was inciteful, let alone impeachable,” one of them read, “and in fact, President Trump urged supporters to exercise their rights ‘peacefully and patriotically.’ ”

That first part might be news to some of the party’s top leaders, though. Although the GOP has rallied around Trump lately, even many GOP senators who appear likely to acquit him have said Trump bore at least some blame for the events of Jan. 6. And that poses problems as Trump’s defense moves beyond constitutionality and into culpability. Continue reading.