HOUSE IMPEACHMENT A TRAGEDY BUT TRUMP DEFENSE IS A FARCE

The 77 pages of the latest Memorandum of Impeachment levied against Donald Trump by the House of Representatives reads like a tragic novel. “This trial arises from President Donald J. Trump’s incitement of insurrection against the Republic he swore to protect,” reads the opening line of the introduction, William Rivers Pitt wrote for Truthout.

The 14-page response from Trump’s legal team, by contrast, reads like pure farce: They misspelled the name of the United States (instead writing “Unites States”) before their counterargument even begins. “I was in the civil litigation business for a long time, a long time ago, and I probably worked as many as 20 courtroom trials over those years.

Here is an axiomatic fact: Had I been responsible for such a cataclysmic typo in the opening header of an official court document, or anywhere in the document for that matter, I would have been fired with enough white-hot heat to turn my bones to glass. Legal communities tend to be tight-knit and gossipy; calamitous gaffes like this are recalled, re-masticated and mercilessly mocked for decades,” Pitt recalled.

“Tragedy and farce: That is the binary state of these two competing documents. The first, from the House impeachment managers, lays out in searing detail what the world watched happen on January 6. The second, from Trump’s ragtag band of defenders, lays out the same defense the former president has used to bat down critics for years: I didn’t do it, there would be nothing wrong if I did do it, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Pitt argued.

On Wednesday, some 370 Capitol staffers spoke with one voice on the need to convict Trump for his actions on January 6. “As congressional employees,” they wrote in a deeply evocative letter, “we don’t have a vote on whether to convict Donald J. Trump for his role in inciting the violent attack at the Capitol, but our senators do. And for our sake, and the sake of the country, we ask that they vote to convict the former president and bar him from ever holding office again.”

The House impeachment memo is clear and bold in its assignation of blame, stating: President Trump’s responsibility for the events of January 6 is unmistakable. After losing the 2020 election, President Trump refused to accept the will of the American people. He spent months asserting, without evidence, that he won in a ‘landslide’ and that the election was “stolen.”

He amplified these lies at every turn, seeking to convince supporters that they were victims of a massive electoral conspiracy that threatened the Nation’s continued existence. But every single court to consider the President’s attacks on the outcome of the election rejected them.

And state and federal officials from both parties refused President Trump’s increasingly desperate demands that they break the law to keep him in power. With his options running out, President Trump announced a “Save America Rally” on January 6. He promised it would be “wild.”

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