A lawyer for former President Donald Trump says he will not raise allegations of fraud in the 2020 election when defending the former president during his upcoming impeachment trial.
Attorney Bruce Castor told KYW Newsradio Philadelphia, “There are a lot of questions about how this election was conducted nationally, but that’s a separate discussion, and I don’t think that in the Senate trial on impeachment process to bring that lawsuit is important because it doesn’t need to be mentioned. To win, President Trump has a lot to work with.”
Castor also rebutted some media reports that have come out. Those reports said Trump parted ways with his initial legal team because of disagreements over whether election fraud allegations should be brought up during the defense process.
I don’t know where people are getting this argument that this is some sort of trial about the president’s defense efforts,” Castor said. Because as you can see from the document that I filed, this document had to be approved by the president himself, and there’s nothing in there about allegations that the election was stolen.”
On Tuesday (Feb. 2), Casto and fellow Trump lawyer David Schoen responded to the impeachment initiated by House Democrats, saying this impeachment trial is unconstitutional because Trump is not currently holding the presidency. They also argued that Trump himself has a First Amendment-protected right to express his views on the accuracy of the election results.
Democrats argue that as president, Trump’s speech is not constitutionally protected and accuse him of inciting a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
In rebuttal to Democrats, Casto said, “Just because somebody gave a speech and people got excited doesn’t mean it was the speaker’s fault – it was some people who got excited and did what they would have known was wrong.” He was referring to Trump’s Jan. 6 speech to the crowd.
In the interview, he avoided going into the details of his argument. But he stressed that Trump has plenty of precedent to use as an argument.
The president deeply regrets the violence at the Capitol, and those people should be punished severely, as they were in the Montgomery County court house when I was district attorney,” he explained, according to the Radio.com broadcast website. But just because someone gives a speech and people get excited about it doesn’t mean that those things are the fault of the speaker. Rather, those who felt excited did what they knew was wrong.”
According to a vote last week, 45 Republican senators rejected outright a proposal to hold an impeachment trial in the Senate. As a result, it seems unlikely that Trump will be convicted. Many Republican senators agree that it would be unconstitutional to convict a former president who did not hold public office.
As things stand, for impeachment to succeed, at least 17 Republican senators would have to join the Democrats’ camp and come together to convict Trump in the ensuing Senate impeachment trial.
Meanwhile, Democrats argued in Tuesday’s briefing that Trump should be impeached and convicted because he should not hold public office in the future.
The Senate impeachment trial against Trump is scheduled to begin on Feb. 8.
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