The 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.
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 the Capitol as it was breached by a violent pro-Trump mob, 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 deadly assault on the Capitol 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 constituted constitutionally protected free speech. While they did not argue explicitly that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, as some said he wanted his legal team 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.
