Representing the former president in last year's trial, which ended with his acquittal by the Senate, was a cadre of well-known attorneys that included White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Jay Sekulow, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former independent counsel Ken Starr, among others.
A double standard was at play in the FBI's raid of the office of Donald Trump's lawyer but not Bill Clinton's. A popular meme in March 2019 questioned why Bill Clinton had “paid Paula Jones $850K to go away” yet the FBI hadn’t raided his lawyer’s office.
Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Nine lawyers allied with Donald Trump were ordered on Thursday to pay Detroit and Michigan a total of $175,000 in sanctions for abusing the court system with a sham lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results.
Today, on the first day of the formal proceedings, Trump’s lawyers were supposed to organize the exit. Only Trump’s lawyers messed up. Trump’s lawyers badly, badly messed up, humiliatingly messed up, world-historically messed up.
Trump’s first counsel, Bruce Castor, seemed lost in vapors of his own making. But Trump’s second and more lucid lawyer, David Schoen, seemed almost belligerent in his refusal to deal with the Belknap precedent.
The partisans who enabled Trump are facing a trial of their own. What they desperately crave is a face-saving excuse for one final round of enabling. The stupid slovenliness of the Trump legal team today, though, threatened to deprive senators of that face-saving excuse.
The senators who will vote to acquit Trump are not voting because they are convinced of his innocence. They are voting because they are scared. And it will take more than an ill-prepared and ill-mannered legal team to unscare them. But the quality of the speeches makes a difference in another respect.
By David Frum. Andrew Harnik / Getty. February 9, 2021. About the author: David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, ...
Belknap was not convicted in the Senate. But the precedent established in 1876 would seem to apply to Trump in 2020, and to apply all the more strongly, given that Belknap had resigned before the House impeached him, whereas Trump was still in office when he was impeached this second time.
They needed to argue that the Senate cannot try—much less convict—an ex-president. On their way to that argument, Trump’s legal team faced a number of bumps. The bumpiest bump of them all is a precedent from the Ulysses S. Grant administration. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, was accused of corruption.
Schoen insisted again and again that a post- term impeachment trial was illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, unprofessional, ultra vires, and possibly even ultraviolet—and yet never once mentioned that one such trial had already happened and been accepted by the Senate at the time as valid.
As the thousands of people gathered on the Ellipse, Trump monitored warm-up speeches by attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman from the White House. Around midday, he left the White House and made his way to his a tent set up for VIPs near the stage.
The Washington Post. WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump was “horrified” when violence broke out at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, as a joint session of Congress convened to confirm that he lost the election, according to his defense attorneys. Trump tweeted calls for peace “upon hearing of the reports of violence” and took “immediate steps” ...
But some publicity for events that day, including ads posted to a website called www.marchtosaveamerica.com, urged participants to “take a stand with President Trump” at the Ellipse and then “march to the US Capitol building to protest the certification of the Electoral College.”
A spokesman for Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has said that around this time Lee received a call on his cellphone from Trump. The president was not calling to inquire about the well-being of the senators who had been rushed from the chamber.
Trump also did not make contact with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R.-Ky., then the Senate majority leader, who was in constant communication with Pence, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, N.Y., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., aides said, along with military and law enforcement officials.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called Mr. Trump's team "disorganized," while Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas said Castor took too long to address the question of the trial's constitutionality.
Representing the former president in last year's trial, which ended with his acquittal by the Senate, was a cadre of well-known attorneys that included White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Jay Sekulow , Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former independent counsel Ken Starr, among others.
Schoen, an Orthodox Jew, initially requested the impeachment trial break after sundown Friday and all day Saturday to observe the Sabbath. Senate leaders were prepared to honor the request, but it was dropped before a resolution detailing the parameters of the proceedings was taken up and passed by the Senate.
Castor testified as a witness for the defense during a pre-trial hearing to Cosby's trial in 2016. The first member of Mr. Trump's legal team to address senators, he raised eyebrows with his meandering and at times confusing presentation that seldom touched on the issue of whether the Senate had the authority to try a former president.
He is well known for declining to prosecute comedian Bill Cosby in 2005 after Temple University employee Andrea Constand accused Cosby of sexually assaulting her in his home. Castor testified as a witness ...