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      Trump Refuses Surprise Call to Testify in His Impeachment Trial

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentDivisions in the SenateList of Senators’ StancesTrump ImpeachedHow the House VotedKey QuotesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Refuses Surprise Call to Testify in His Impeachment TrialThe former president’s lawyers wasted little time in swatting away the invitation to testify, saying the trial was “unconstitutional” and the request to testify a “public relations stunt.”President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers denied that he incited the attack or meant to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral votes to formalize President Biden’s victory.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesNicholas Fandos, Michael S. Schmidt and Feb. 4, 2021Updated 9:19 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The House impeachment managers issued a surprise request on Thursday for Donald J. Trump to testify in his Senate trial next week, making a long-shot attempt to question the former president under oath about his conduct on the day of the Capitol riot. It was quickly rejected by his lawyers.In a letter to Mr. Trump, Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead House impeachment prosecutor, said the former president’s response this week to the House’s charge that he incited an insurrection on Jan. 6 had disputed crucial facts about his actions, and demanded further explanation.“Two days ago, you filed an answer in which you denied many factual allegations set forth in the article of impeachment,” wrote Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “You have thus attempted to put critical facts at issue notwithstanding the clear and overwhelming evidence of your constitutional offense.”He proposed interviewing Mr. Trump “at a mutually convenient time and place” between Monday and Thursday. The trial is set to begin on Tuesday.But Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David Schoen, wasted little time in swatting away the invitation. They said that Mr. Trump wanted no part of a proceeding they insisted was “unconstitutional” because he is no longer in office, and called Mr. Raskin’s request a “public relations stunt.”“Your letter only confirms what is known to everyone: You cannot prove your allegations against the 45th president of the United States, who is now a private citizen,” they wrote in a letter to Mr. Raskin.Mr. Schoen and another adviser to Mr. Trump, Jason Miller, later clarified that the former president did not plan to testify voluntarily before or after the trial begins. Instead, his defense team intends to argue that the case should be dismissed outright on constitutional grounds, and that Mr. Trump is not guilty of the bipartisan “incitement of insurrection” charge in which the House asserts he provoked a mob with baseless voter fraud claims to attack the Capitol in a bid to stop Congress from formalizing his loss.The decision, if it holds, is likely to be helpful for both sides. With Senate Republicans already lining up to acquit Mr. Trump for the second time in just over a year, testimony from a famously impolitic former president who continues to insist falsely that he won the election risks jeopardizing his defense.Democrats might have benefited from Mr. Trump’s testimony, but his silence also allows the House managers to tell senators sitting in judgment that they at least gave Mr. Trump an opportunity to have his say. Perhaps more important, they quickly claimed — despite the defense’s protests — that his refusal established an “adverse inference supporting his guilt,” meaning that they would cite his silence as further proof that their allegations are true.“Despite his lawyers’ rhetoric, any official accused of inciting armed violence against the government of the United States should welcome the chance to testify openly and honestly — that is, if the official had a defense,” Mr. Raskin said in a statement Thursday evening. “We will prove at trial that President Trump’s conduct was indefensible.”Mr. Raskin could still try to subpoena testimony from Mr. Trump during the trial. But doing so would require support from a majority of the Senate and could prompt a messy legal battle over claims of executive privilege that could take weeks or longer to unwind, snarling the agenda of President Biden and Democrats. Members of both parties already pressing for a speedy trial signaled skepticism on Thursday to calling Mr. Trump.“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and one of Mr. Biden’s closest allies, said of Mr. Trump taking the witness stand. Asked to clarify his reasoning, he replied, “Have you met President Trump?”“I don’t think that would be in anybody’s interest,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s allies. “It’s just a nightmare for the country to do this.”Read the Letter Calling on Trump to TestifyIn a letter to former President Donald J. Trump, the lead House impeachment prosecutor said Mr. Trump’s response this week to the House’s charge had challenged “overwhelming evidence” about his conduct as the assault unfolded, and demanded further explanation.The managers said their invitation for Mr. Trump to testify was prompted primarily by his lawyers’ official response to the impeachment charge, filed with the Senate on Tuesday. In it, Mr. Trump’s lawyers flatly denied that he incited the attack or meant to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral votes, despite Mr. Trump’s clear and stated focus on using the process to overturn the results. They also denied that a speech to a throng of his supporters just before the attack in which Mr. Trump urged the crowd to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” against the election results, suggesting that Republican lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence had the power to change the outcome, “had anything to do with the action at the Capitol.”Mr. Trump’s team argued that the former president could not be culpable for those statements, or for the falsehoods he spread about election fraud, because they were protected by First Amendment rights given that he believes that he was the true winner.In his letter and subsequent statement, Mr. Raskin did not indicate whether he intended to try to subpoena testimony from Mr. Trump or any other witnesses when the trial begins.The question has proved a difficult one for the nine House managers. Because they moved quickly to impeach Mr. Trump only a week after the attack, they did no meaningful fact-finding before charging him, leaving holes in their evidentiary record. One of the most notable has to do with how precisely Mr. Trump conducted himself when it became clear the Capitol was under assault on Jan. 6.The president sent several tweets sympathizing with the mob and calling for peace during that time, but as the House managers made clear in their 80-page trial brief filed with the Senate this week, they possess little more direct evidence of how Mr. Trump responded. Instead they rely on news reports and accounts by lawmakers who desperately tried to reach him to send in National Guard reinforcements, which have suggested that he was “delighted” by the invasion.Testimony by Mr. Trump or other White House or military officials could clarify that. But in this case, a greater understanding would almost certainly prolong the trial by weeks or longer. Republicans are averse to an extended airing of Mr. Trump’s conduct, but for Democrats, the cost would be steep to their ambitions to pass coronavirus relief legislation and install the remainder of Mr. Biden’s cabinet — with very little chance of ultimately changing the verdict of the trial.Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, with whom the decision will most likely rest, has indicated would be comfortable proceeding without witnesses.“We will move forward with a fair and speedy trial,” he said on Thursday. “The House managers will present their case. The former president’s counsel will mount a defense, and senators will have to look deep into their consciences and determine if Donald Trump is guilty, and if so, ever qualified again to enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”The calculus for Mr. Trump’s legal team is far simpler. In addition to alienating Republican senators reluctant to convict a former president who remains so popular in their party, Mr. Trump could put himself in legal jeopardy if he testified. He has a penchant for stating falsehoods, and it is a federal felony to do so before Congress.Mr. Schoen accused Democrats in the House and Senate of running an unfair proceeding. He said they had yet to share even basic rules, like how long the defense would have to present its case.“I don’t think anyone being impeached would show up at the proceedings we firmly believe are unconstitutional,” Mr. Schoen said in a text message.He and Mr. Castor also rejected Mr. Raskin’s reasoning that Mr. Trump’s failure to testify would bolster their argument that he is guilty.“As you certainly know,” they wrote, “there is no such thing as a negative inference in this unconstitutional proceeding.”But the managers also appeared to be appealing, at least in part, to Mr. Trump’s impulse for self-defense, betting that he might defy his lawyers’ guidance not to speak. Throughout Mr. Trump’s presidency — first during the Russia investigation and then in his first impeachment inquiry — he was eager to tell his side of the story, convinced that he was his own best spokesman.During the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Trump insisted to his legal team that he wanted to sit and answer prosecutors’ questions. That desire unnerved his lawyers, who believed that Mr. Trump would almost certainly make some sort of false statement and face greater legal consequences. One member of his legal team quit over the issue.Ultimately, Mr. Mueller declined to seek a subpoena for Mr. Trump’s testimony and accepted written responses from him that later prompted the special counsel to question whether Mr. Trump had been truthful.Hailey Fuchs More

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      Impeachment Case Argues Trump Was ‘Singularly Responsible’ for Capitol Riot

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentDivisions in the SenateList of Senators’ StancesTrump ImpeachedHow the House VotedKey QuotesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyImpeachment Case Argues Trump Was ‘Singularly Responsible’ for Capitol RiotThe House managers cited the Constitution’s framers in urging that Donald J. Trump be convicted and disqualified from holding office. Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the Senate had no jurisdiction.“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,”  Donald J. Trump told his supporters at a rally in Washington on Jan. 6. Credit…Kenny Holston for The New York TimesNicholas Fandos and Feb. 2, 2021Updated 8:35 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The House impeachment managers on Tuesday laid out their case against Donald J. Trump, asserting that he was “singularly responsible” for the deadly assault on the Capitol last month and must be convicted and barred from holding public office.In an 80-page brief filed on Tuesday, the managers outlined the arguments they planned to make when the Senate opens Mr. Trump’s trial next week, contending that the former president whipped his supporters into a “frenzy” as part of a concerted campaign to cling to power. Spinning a vivid narrative of a harrowing day when lawmakers were forced to flee as a violent pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol, the prosecutors also reached back centuries to bolster their case, invoking George Washington and the Constitutional Convention.“The framers of the Constitution feared a president who would corrupt his office by sparing ‘no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected,’” wrote the nine House Democrats, led by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, quoting directly from the 1787 debate in Philadelphia. “If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a joint session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be.”In Mr. Trump’s own shorter filing, specked with typos and stripped of the former president’s usual bombast, his lawyers flatly denied that he had incited the attack and repeatedly argued that the Senate “lacks jurisdiction” to try a former president. They repeatedly urged an immediate dismissal of the single charge against him, “incitement of insurrection.”“The Senate of the United States lacks jurisdiction over the 45th president because he holds no public office from which he can be removed, rendering the article of impeachment moot and a non-justiciable question,” the lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David Schoen, wrote in their 14-page response to the charge.Their other broad argument was that Mr. Trump’s remarks on Jan. 6 and in the weeks before were constitutionally protected. While they did not argue explicitly that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, as some said he wanted his legal team to do, the lawyers sought to shroud his false claims of widespread voter fraud in free-speech arguments.They effectively argued that Mr. Trump believed he “won it by a landslide,” and therefore was within his First Amendment rights to “express his belief that the election results were suspect.” His claims could not be disproved, they added, because there was “insufficient evidence.”President Biden won the election by about seven million votes, according to results certified by every state. Dozens of cases Mr. Trump brought alleging voting fraud or improprieties were tossed out or decided against him, many times by Republican-appointed judges, for lack of evidence.The impeachment filings provided the clearest preview yet of the legal strategies that are likely to shape a politically fraught impeachment trial of Mr. Trump — his second in just over a year — that is scheduled to begin in earnest in the Senate on Tuesday. They indicated that both sides expected drawn-out debates over the constitutionality of a trial, as much as Mr. Trump’s culpability for what took place.Despite their initial criticisms, a majority of Republican senators now appear to be lining up once again to acquit Mr. Trump. But the arguments could determine the difference between a near-party-line verdict like the one that capped the former president’s first trial in 2020 or a more bipartisan rebuke that could constrain any future political ambition he harbors.Though senators have yet to agree to a final set of rules to govern the proceeding, both parties appear to share an interest in an exceedingly swift trial, without new witnesses or fact-finding, that could conclude as soon as Saturday, Feb. 13. That would be far shorter than any presidential impeachment trial in history. But Republicans are eager to turn a page on a divisive former president, and Democrats are impatient to turn to advancing the agenda of the current one.The House impeachment managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin, right, submitted an 80-page brief blaming Mr. Trump for the violent attack.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf Mr. Trump’s lawyers were trying to reassure Republican senators that they could dismiss the case without confronting its merits, the House managers were aiming instead to force them to confront the terror of the Capitol riot with an unusually visceral prosecution. They have compiled hours of footage from Parler, Twitter and elsewhere that they plan to play from the well of the Senate next week to compel Republicans to face Mr. Trump’s conduct head on, rather than retreating behind arguments around the process.The approach was evident in their legal brief, which was more dramatic in parts than a typical courtroom filing. It follows Mr. Trump from his early-summer warnings about a “rigged” election up to his last, futile attempts to target Congress’s Jan. 6 counting session to snatch victory away from President Biden.All the while, the managers argued, Mr. Trump was issuing a “call to mobilize” to his supporters to “stop the steal.” He invited them to come to Washington in early January. Then used a speech on the Ellipse outside the White House just before the attack to urge them to “fight like hell” and march to the Capitol to confront members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence.The calls incited the mob to action, they argued, citing videos posted on social media in which supporters of Mr. Trump can be heard yelling “invade the Capitol building” after he urges them to “show strength.”“He summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue,” the managers wrote.Unlike the first impeachment case against Mr. Trump, which centered on his pressure campaign on Ukraine, this one has bipartisan support and the prosecutors appear poised to make frequent use of Republicans’ own criticisms of Mr. Trump. Their brief quoted Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach, as well as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, who said publicly that Mr. Trump “provoked” the mob.In making constitutional arguments in favor of Mr. Trump’s conviction, though, they reached hundreds of years further back, arguing that Mr. Trump had not only prompted violence but threatened the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power begun by Washington. They also cited debates by the founders about who would be subject to impeachment and when, as well as a 19th-century impeachment trial of a former war secretary, to assert that the Senate clearly had a right to try Mr. Trump even after he left office.“There is no ‘January exception’ to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution,” the managers wrote. “A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last.”They also insisted that the First Amendment right to free speech could not shield Mr. Trump from responsibility for inciting violence that would seek to do harm to the Constitution, undermining all the rights enshrined there, including free speech.The president’s filing was narrower by design, with a lengthier, more detailed brief due from his lawyers early next week. Still, the contours of their defense were becoming clear.The lawyers said Democrats had misinterpreted Mr. Trump’s actions and his intent, denying that he was responsible for the Capitol riot or that he intended to interfere with Congress’s formalizing of Mr. Biden’s win. They said his words to supporters on Jan. 6 — “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — were not meant as a call to violent action, but were “about the need to fight for election security in general.”“It is denied that President Trump incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior,” they wrote. In another section, they denied that Mr. Trump had “threatened” Georgia’s Republican secretary of state or “acted improperly” when he demanded during a January phone call that the official “find” the votes needed to overturn his loss in that state and vaguely warned of a “criminal offense.”The lawyers reprised an argument against the constitutionality of the trial popular with Republican senators. They asserted that a plain reading of the Constitution — which does not explicitly discuss what to do with an official impeached but not tried before he leaves office — does not permit the Senate to try a former president.But they also said that Mr. Trump “denies the allegation” that his claims that he won the election were false. If that argument plays a central role in the trial, Republican senators could quickly find themselves painfully wedged between a conspiracy theory they fear could do lasting damage to their party and millions of their own voters who believe it.Mr. Trump’s response appeared to be somewhat hastily assembled after the former president shook up his legal team just 48 hours before the brief was due; the response, for example, was addressed to the “Unites States Senate.”In an interview later, Mr. Schoen pointed to another potential argument that could help Mr. Trump: that at least some of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol planned their attack in advance, suggesting that the former president was not the inciting force.“I have no reason to believe anyone involved with Trump was in the know,” he said of the violence that unfolded at the Capitol. Still, he conceded the heart of the defense would lie elsewhere.Nicholas Fandos More

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      House Impeachment Managers Argue Trump Was 'Responsible' for Capitol Riots

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeTracking the Oath KeepersNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTrump’s Legal Team Says Senate Has No Right to Try Him as Prosecution Calls Him ‘Singularly Responsible’ for RiotHouse Impeachment Managers Argue Trump Was ‘Responsible’ for Capitol RiotsFeb. 2, 2021, 8:31 a.m. ETFeb. 2, 2021, 8:31 a.m. ETNicholas Fandos and Former President Donald J. Trump shook up his legal team just 48 hours before the legal brief was due.Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesFormer President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers denied on Tuesday that he incited the deadly assault on the Capitol and argued that the Senate had no power to try a former president, as House prosecutors made their case that Mr. Trump was “singularly responsible” for the Jan. 6 rampage and must be convicted and barred from holding any future office.The dueling filings provided the clearest preview yet of a politically fraught impeachment trial — the second in just a year — scheduled to begin in earnest next Tuesday. Both sides indicated they were ready for a debate over the constitutionality of trying a former president. They were also lining up diametrically opposed interpretations of a set of events witnessed on live television across the nation.In his first formal answer to the “incitement of insurrection” charge against him, Mr. Trump’s lawyers denied that he was responsible for the Capitol riot or that he intended to interfere with Congress’s formalizing of President Biden’s election win. They said his words to supporters, some who later stormed the building — “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — were protected by his First Amendment right of free speech. They said they were not meant as a reference to violent action, but “about the need to fight for election security in general.” Read the Brief from Trump’s Defense Team on Impeachment ChargeFormer President Donald J. Trump’s legal team submitted a brief on Tuesday to the Senate outlining his defense against the impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection.”“It is denied that President Trump incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior,” the lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David Schoen, wrote in the 14-page filing.Notably, the document avoided repeating or attempting to defend Mr. Trump’s bogus claims that the November election had been “stolen” from him by widespread fraud, which the former president had wanted to be the central feature of his defense. But his lawyers in effect argued that Mr. Trump believed he won, and therefore was within his rights to “express his belief that the election results were suspect.” His claims could not be disproved, they added, because there was “insufficient evidence.” (Judges rejected more than 60 lawsuits by Mr. Trump and his allies claiming varying degrees of fraud or irregularities.) Above all, the former president’s lawyers said the Constitution did not permit the Senate to try a former president after he had left office — despite the fact that the Senate has tried a former official in the past. The response arrived two hours after the nine House Democrats preparing to prosecute the case argued in their own 80-page pretrial brief that Mr. Trump was directly to blame for the violent attack on Jan. 6 and a broader attack on democracy that showed he would do anything to “reassert his grip on power” if he were allowed to seek election again.Read the Brief From the Impeachment ManagersNine House Democrats submitted a 80-page pretrial brief laying out their case in the impeachment trial against former President Donald J. Trump.“President Trump has demonstrated beyond doubt that he will resort to any method to maintain or reassert his grip on power,” wrote the managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “A president who violently attacks the democratic process has no right to participate in it.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.The House prosecutors also refuted Mr. Trump’s constitutional challenge to the case, asserting that history and even conservative constitutional theory supported the Senate’s right to try a former president.“There is no ‘January exception’ to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution,” the managers wrote. “A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last.”They likewise insisted that Mr. Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech did not shield him from responsibility for inciting violence that would seek to do harm to the Constitution, undermining all the rights enshrined there, including free speech.Mr. Trump’s response took an unusual form, addressing the House’s article of impeachment point by point. It also appeared to be somewhat hastily assembled after Mr. Trump shook up his legal team just 48 hours before the brief was due; the response was addressed to the “Unites States Senate.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump's Lawyers Are Unlikely to Focus on Election Fraud Claims

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentDivisions in the SenateList of Senators’ StancesTrump ImpeachedHow the House VotedKey QuotesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump’s New Lawyers Not Expected to Focus on False Election Claims in His DefenseWhile Mr. Trump has argued for it, his lawyers will instead echo the argument of many Republicans that the impeachment trial of a former president is unconstitutional.Bruce L. Castor Jr., a former district attorney in Pennsylvania, joined former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team this weekend.Credit…Matt Rourke/Associated PressMaggie Haberman and Feb. 1, 2021Updated 10:02 p.m. ETThe new legal team that former President Donald J. Trump has brought in for his impeachment trial next week is unlikely to focus his defense on his baseless claims of widespread election fraud and instead question whether the trial is even constitutional since he is no longer president, people close to the team said on Monday.Several Trump advisers have told the former president that using his election claims as a defense for his role in the mob attack on the Capitol last month is unwise, according to a person close to the new lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor Jr. The person said the former president’s advisers did not expect that it would be part of the arguments they make before the Senate.In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday, Mr. Schoen confirmed that he would not make that argument. “I’m not in this case for that,” he said.Mr. Schoen, an Atlanta-based criminal defense lawyer, and Mr. Castor, a former district attorney in Pennsylvania, replaced Butch Bowers and four other lawyers working with him after they parted ways with the former president.A person close to Mr. Trump said there was disagreement about the approach to strategy, as he pushed to have the legal team focus on election fraud. The person also said that the former president had no “chemistry” with Mr. Bowers, a South Carolina lawyer recommended to him by Senator Lindsey Graham, one of his most loyal supporters.A second person close to Mr. Trump said that Mr. Bowers had seemed “overwhelmed” by the case and confirmed a report from Axios that the lawyer had sought about $3 million for fees, researchers and other expenses.The new team has to file a brief with the Senate on Tuesday that will provide a first glimpse of how they plan to defend the former president. Mr. Trump never had an opportunity to offer a defense in the House impeachment proceedings because of the speed with which they were conducted.Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, warned Mr. Trump’s team on Monday to stay away from rehashing his inflated grievances and debunked theories about election fraud. Better, he said, to focus on rebutting the particulars of the House’s “incitement of insurrection” charge.“It’s really not material,” Mr. Cornyn told reporters in the Capitol of Mr. Trump’s repeated claims. “As much as there might be a temptation to bring in other matters, I think it would be a disservice to the president’s own defense to get bogged down in things that really aren’t before the Senate.”Many Republicans on Capitol Hill expect the defense team to at least partly rely on their argument that holding a trial of a former president is unconstitutional. People close to the Trump legal team said that would be a main avenue of defense, and Mr. Schoen told The Journal-Constitution that the constitutional question would be key.Mr. Schoen also said he planned to argue that Mr. Trump’s language did not “constitute incitement” of the violence on Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. But not all of the former president’s advisers share the belief that such an argument should be made; some have said privately that it is unnecessary to debate the key focus of the impeachment articles.The constitutional debate around that issue — many scholars disagree, citing the fact that the Senate has tried a former official in the past — will figure significantly in the trial. In preparation, the Senate has explicitly asked both sides to address in their written briefs “whether Donald John Trump is subject to the jurisdiction of a court of impeachment for acts committed as president of the United States, notwithstanding the expiration of his term in said office.”The House managers are set to file their own, more detailed legal brief on Tuesday. The document should offer the first comprehensive road map of their argument that Mr. Trump sowed baseless claims of election fraud, summoned his supporters to Washington and then directly provoked them to confront Congress as it met in the Capitol to certify his election loss.The brief will also include an argument in favor of holding the trial, with the managers prepared to argue that the framers of the Constitution intended impeachment to apply to officials who had committed offenses while in office.A similar document from Mr. Trump’s team to expand on their initial pleading is due next week before the trial begins on Feb. 9.Some around the former president have suggested arguing against the central accusation in the impeachment article — that he incited an insurrection — and instead focusing more closely on process issues like the constitutionality of the case.While the lawyers were just named, Mr. Schoen has been speaking to Mr. Trump and others around him in an informal capacity for several days, people close to the former president said. Mr. Schoen has represented a range of clients, like mobsters and Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr.Mr. Castor is best known for reaching a deal not to prosecute Bill Cosby for sexual assault when he was the district attorney of Montgomery County, Pa. He also briefly served as the state’s acting attorney general.Mr. Castor’s cousin is Stephen R. Castor, the congressional investigator who battled Democrats over Mr. Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was preparing to run against him. A person familiar with the discussions said that Stephen Castor had recommended his cousin to the former president.It is unclear how close the Castor cousins are. Stephen Castor is a veteran of some of Capitol Hill’s most fiercely partisan oversight disputes in the past decade. He worked on investigations into the Obama administration’s handling of an attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and a gun trafficking program known as Operation Fast and Furious.In the meantime, the nine House impeachment managers have all but gone underground in recent days, favoring private trial preparations to the kind of TV interviews and other public appearances often used in Washington to try to shift public opinion.Democratic leaders are trying to carry out both the president’s lengthy legislative agenda and a major impeachment trial of his predecessor more or less simultaneously. The decision to maintain a low profile was apparently driven by the desire to divert as little attention as possible from Mr. Biden’s push for coronavirus relief legislation, the priority issue of his agenda.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The G.O.P. Is in a Doom Loop of Bizarro

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe G.O.P. Is in a Doom Loop of BizarroBut will it doom the rest of us, too?Opinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021Credit…L.E. Baskow/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHere’s what we know about American politics: The Republican Party is stuck, probably irreversibly, in a doom loop of bizarro. If the Trump-incited Capitol insurrection didn’t snap the party back to sanity — and it didn’t — nothing will.What isn’t clear yet is who, exactly, will end up facing doom. Will it be the G.O.P. as a significant political force? Or will it be America as we know it? Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer. It depends a lot on how successful Republicans will be in suppressing votes.About the bizarro: Even I had some lingering hope that the Republican establishment might try to end Trumpism. But such hopes died this week.On Tuesday Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has said that Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the insurrection was impeachable, voted for a measure that would have declared a Trump trial unconstitutional because he’s no longer in office. (Most constitutional scholars disagree.)On Thursday Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader — who still hasn’t conceded that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency, but did declare that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack on Congress — visited Mar-a-Lago, presumably to make amends.In other words, the G.O.P.’s national leadership, after briefly flirting with sense, has surrendered to the fantasies of the fringe. Cowardice rules.And the fringe is consolidating its hold at the state level. The Arizona state party censured the Republican governor for the sin of belatedly trying to contain the coronavirus. The Texas G.O.P. has adopted the slogan “We are the storm,” which is associated with QAnon, although the party denies it intended any link. Oregon Republicans have endorsed the completely baseless claim, contradicted by the rioters themselves, that the attack on the Capitol was a left-wing false flag operation.How did this happen to what was once the party of Dwight Eisenhower? Political scientists argue that traditional forces of moderation have been weakened by factors like the nationalization of politics and the rise of partisan media, notably Fox News.This opens the door to a process of self-reinforcing extremism (something, by the way, that I’ve seen happen in a minor fashion within some academic subfields). As hard-liners gain power within a group, they drive out moderates; what remains of the group is even more extreme, which drives out even more moderates; and so on. A party starts out complaining that taxes are too high; after a while it begins claiming that climate change is a giant hoax; it ends up believing that all Democrats are Satanist pedophiles.This process of radicalization began long before Donald Trump; it goes back at least to Newt Gingrich’s takeover of Congress in 1994. But Trump’s reign of corruption and lies, followed by his refusal to concede and his attempt to overturn the election results, brought it to a head. And the cowardice of the Republican establishment has sealed the deal. One of America’s two major political parties has parted ways with facts, logic and democracy, and it’s not coming back.What happens next? You might think that a party that goes off the deep end morally and intellectually would also find itself going off the deep end politically. And that has in fact happened in some states. Those fantasist Oregon Republicans, who have been shut out of power since 2013, seem to be going the way of their counterparts in California, a once-mighty party reduced to impotence in the face of a Democratic supermajority.But it’s not at all clear that this will happen at a national level. True, as Republicans have become more extreme they have lost broad support; the G.O.P. has won the popular vote for president only once since 1988, and 2004 was an outlier influenced by the lingering rally-around-the-flag effects of 9/11.Given the unrepresentative nature of our electoral system, however, Republicans can achieve power even while losing the popular vote. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016, but he became president anyway, and he came fairly close to pulling it out in 2020 despite a seven million vote deficit. The Senate is evenly divided even though Democratic members represent 41 million more people than Republicans.And the Republican response to electoral defeat isn’t to change policies to win over voters; it is to try to rig the next election. Georgia has long been known for systematic suppression of Black voters; it took a remarkable organizing effort by Democrats, led by Stacey Abrams, to overcome that suppression and win the state’s electoral votes and Senate seats. So the Republicans who control the state are doubling down on disenfranchisement, with proposed new voter ID requirements and other measures to limit voting.The bottom line is that we don’t know whether we’ve earned more than a temporary reprieve. A president who tried to retain power despite losing an election has been foiled. But a party that buys into bizarre conspiracy theories and denies the legitimacy of its opposition isn’t getting saner, and still has a good chance of taking complete power in four years.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Marco Rubio Deserves Ivanka Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarco Rubio Deserves Ivanka TrumpWill the senator’s sycophancy and shape-shifting come to naught?Opinion ColumnistJan. 29, 2021Credit…Ben WisemanIt’s a measure of the Republican Party’s current depravity that I think of the period when Marco Rubio was besmirching Donald Trump’s genitalia as the good old days.It was early 2016, Trump hadn’t yet locked down the Republican presidential nomination and Rubio, smarting from Trump’s nickname for him (“Little Marco’) and cracks about his overactive sweat glands, began pointing voters toward Trump’s private parts.“He’s, like, 6-2, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5-2,” Rubio told voters at a campaign rally in late February that year. “Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands.”In that age of innocence, we were talking and even laughing about the nether regions of Republican anatomy. Five years later, we’re talking and most certainly not laughing about the nether regions of Republican morality, which Rubio plumbs as shamelessly as his more exposed Senate colleagues Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton do.All four seem to have dreams of 2024 and don’t want to run afoul of Trump and his base, no matter how thoroughly that debases them. They’re vain weather vanes of his hold on the party, the strength and stubbornness of which are evident in the populous crowd of Trump-smooching presidential aspirants (these four, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, etc.) versus the sparse crew of Trump-spanking ones (Larry Hogan, Ben Sasse and that’s about it).As Trump’s impeachment trial looms, everything that these young or youngish senators say and do can be seen as an audition for his mantle, which Hawley and Cruz reached for with special cynicism when they joined six other senators in voting not to certify Joe Biden’s election. Rubio and Cotton didn’t go quite that far, but I’m sure Rubio was tempted. Ever since, he has mustered extra energy for showing what a fierce Trump loyalist he can be.On Fox News recently, he dismissed Trump’s upcoming Senate trial as “stupid,” seemingly daring Hawley, Cruz and Cotton to top his disdain and his adjective. He paired that exalted commentary with an inadequately punctuated, inelegantly worded and ineptly reasoned tweet: Five people died when a Trump-loving mob, whipped into a violent frenzy by his and his Republican enablers’ lies about election fraud, stormed and trashed the Capitol. But sure, Senator Rubio, Democrats’ upset is purely theatrical. Absolutely, the lesson here is the bloodthirst of “the radical left.”That’s no garden-variety misdirection. That’s pure derangement.Marco Rubio greeted Ivanka Trump at the Capitol in 2017.Credit…Erica Werner/Associated PressIt also smacks of desperation. “Little Marco,” you see, may have big trouble. It’s blond, it’s relentless, it has a new address in Florida and it’s spelled I-V-A-N-K-A. The shiniest Trump and her smug husband, pariahs now in New York City, have moved on, and there’s some speculation that their relocation presages a Senate candidacy for her in 2022, when Rubio is up for re-election.She’d potentially challenge him in the Florida Republican primary. Now there’s a reason to sweat. Rubio confronts what Republican lawmakers all over the country do, the prospect of being ousted, en route to their general elections, by rivals who are even Trumpier than they are. Only there’s no out-Trumping an actual Trump. And there’s no defaming this Trump progeny without inflaming the Trump patriarch.Ivanka would be Rubio’s worst nightmare. She’d also be his perfect comeuppance. He would have done all that shape-shifting, summoned all that sycophancy and sold out for naught.Maybe Ivanka would take pity on him and take a pass.Yes, that was a joke.As, at this point, is Marco Rubio.I can remember back to 2013, when, as a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in the Senate, he helped to draft legislation for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for millions of people in this country illegally. He was then styling himself as a pragmatist determined to broaden the Republican Party’s tent.Now he rails against “amnesty.” He’s a Trump-style populist, content with a clownish part in the Republican Party’s circus.I remember how his parents’ flight to the United States from Cuba was the supposed cornerstone of his political convictions, the prompt for a hawkish foreign policy with no tolerance for autocrats at odds with our democratic values.But he just spent four years blowing kisses at an American president more autocratic and more contemptuous of those values than any in his lifetime.I remember how, for much of 2016, he pledged that he would not-not-not run for re-election to the Senate, framing that resolve as a point of honor. He said that it was an impotent institution and that lawmakers needed to limit their time in Congress, lest they become hacks. He expressed indignation at any suggestion that he would change his mind, tweeting: “I have only said like 10000 times I will be a private citizen in January.”That was in mid-May of that year. Little more than a month later, he announced his re-election bid. So much for private citizenry.Rubio says whatever he feels that the moment demands, whatever keeps the wind in his sails, because he’s unfazed by the fact that he once said something completely different, by the possibility that he’ll contradict himself down the line or by the bald selectiveness of his self-righteousness.He’s a creature of Republican vogues, so he’s polishing his anti-elitist riffs, like a tweet with which he slammed the emerging Biden administration: Politeness! Order! The horror! But that’s not the best part. Biden stands out from his five immediate predecessors in the White House, including Trump, for not having the Ivy League degrees that they did. Where there’s fancy education aplenty is in Rubio’s ranks: Hawley has degrees from Stanford and Yale, Cruz from Princeton and Harvard and Cotton from Harvard two times over.Maybe Rubio was slyly knocking those potential 2024 competitors, too, and previewing a line of 2024 attack. His own degrees are from the University of Florida, the University of Miami and the School of Unchecked Opportunism.To his anti-elitism he has added overwrought, indiscriminate media bashing, as when he responded to the coronavirus’s rampage through America with a tweet last March that accused journalists of “glee & delight in reporting that the U.S. has more #CoronaVirus cases than #China” and called it “grotesque.”I don’t recall such glee. I’ll tell you what’s grotesque: training more of your fury about the pandemic’s devastation at the unelected people covering it than at the elected one minimizing and mismanaging it.He was preening for Trump. He was parroting him. He still is, and he’s proving that while Trump may be gone from the White House, he remains deeply present in Washington, because it’s lousy with minions who remade themselves in his image.Rubio’s fate was to become what Trump once called him, not just exuberantly but prophetically: a little man, at least by the yardstick of integrity, which is the only endowment that matters.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The First Post-Reagan Presidency

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      Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More