Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Friday launched an aggressive defense in Trump’s second indictment – making several false and misleading allegations to bolster their case.
The lawyers argued that Trump did nothing to incite the uprising at the US Capitol on January 6, distorting the facts about what happened that day and what happened in the past.
Here is a fact check of some of their claims:
The defense team misleads Trump into defending violence
Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen highlighted comments from Democrats that he had suggested that he promote or defend violence. Trump, he argued, is different from these Democrats.
“Compare the president’s repeated condemnation of violence with the rhetoric of his opponents,” Van der Veen said. He then played a video condemning Trump’s tracks condemning violence and calling himself an ‘ally of all peaceful protesters’, with some selectively edited excerpts from Democrats.
Facts first: This argument and video was misleading by omission. Trump has indeed condemned violence and called for peaceful protest, but he has also repeatedly applauded or defended violence and aggressive behavior.
Trump has done the following, among other things, since launching his presidential campaign in 2015: A Republican congressman praised for assaulting a journalist; urged police officers not to worry about injuring the head of suspects arresting them; said he wanted to hit a protester in the face; supporters encouraged a ‘protester they saw to hold a tomato,’ knock out the safe ‘; said a kidnapping stance against Michigan Democratic government Gretchen Whitmer is not a real ‘problem’; approvingly telling a false story about an American general in the early 20th century who killed Muslim terrorists with bullets in the blood of pigs; said it was a ‘beautiful sight’ when authorities threw a journalist on the ground during unrest in Minneapolis; mocks a reporter who was shot with a rubber bullet; and applauded Trump supporters who surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus on the highway, an incident that prompted an FBI investigation.
Trump’s lawyer falsely claims that Trump’s first two tweets provoked calm during the Capitol attack
Van der Veen claims that ‘the first two messages the president sent via Twitter as soon as the Capitol attack began’ encouraged people to ‘remain peaceful’ and demanded ‘no violence’.
Facts first: It is not true.
Trump’s “remain peaceful” tweet at 14:38 and “no violence” tweet at 15:13 were his second and third tweeted messages after the Capitol was violated, not his first. Trump’s first tweet was at 2:24 pm: “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what needed to be done to protect our country and our Constitution, and gave the state a chance to confirm a corrected set of facts. , not the fraudulent or inaccurate they previously asked to certify. US demands the truth! ”
Rioters have already entered the U.S. Capitol building against the Trump tweet about Pence.
No, the media does not lie that there was a burglary during the 2016 election
Van der Veen claimed that Washington officials other than Trump were the ones using reckless and inflammatory rhetoric. He claims: “The entire Democratic Party and national news media have repeated over the past four years without any evidence that the 2016 election was hijacked.”
Facts first: The Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign was indeed hacked during the 2016 election campaign; it is a fact, not a claim made ‘without evidence’. The American Intelligence Community, special advice Robert Mueller and the two parties Senate Intelligence Committee all concluded that the Russian government was responsible for stealing and leaking internal documents and emails.
If van der Veen suggests that the “entire Democratic Party and national media” falsely spent four years hacking the real votes or total votes in the 2016 election, that would not be true either. We can not speak for every word that has been uttered by every Democrat or every journalist since 2016, but it is clearly inaccurate to say that the whole party or the whole media has spent four years inciting such a claim. The national discussion on burglary during the 2016 election focused on the actual, confirmed burglary directed at the Democrats’ computer systems.