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.
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 clips of Trump 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’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 started’ 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” 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 the chance to confirm a corrected set of facts “not the fraudulent or inaccurate they previously asked to certify. USA 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 hacked.”
If van der Veen were to suggest that the ‘whole Democratic Party and national media’ had falsely claimed for four years that hackers had changed the actual votes or 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.