National Public Radio this morning reviews timelines to insurrection assembled by Ryan Goodman and colleagues at Just Security. Former president Donald J. Trump goes on trial in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday for inciting the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
“While we should be focused on the events of January 6th, we should not be hyper-focused on them,” Goodman says. “The groundwork was laid well in advance.” He spotlights events from the previous year leading up to the insurrection.
Trump tweeted support for armed protests in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia last April. In a May fundraising email, Trump urged followers to join “the Trump Army.” In a Wisconsin speech in August, Trump said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged, remember that.” He repeated that during the Republican national convention.
Trump supporters who arrived for the Jan. 6 rally came because Trump told them to be there. It would be “wild.”
“Let’s have trial by combat,” Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer blustered.
“You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump said when he took the stage. “You have to be show strength and you have to be strong.”
Trump urged the crowd to go to the Capitol. At 2:24 p.m. Trump tweets, essentially, that Vice President Mike Pence had betrayed them by failing to deliver the election to Trump. The crowd went wild. There were calls to hang Pence.
Steve Inskeep: Later, when many alleged attackers were under arrest, political violence specialist Robert Pape read many of the statements they had made to the FBI and the media.
Robert Pape: A woman from California said — and these are in the court documents, and I quote — “She felt called upon by President Donald Trump to travel to DC to change the outcome of the election because she believes it was stolen.” We have a man from Arizona who said he was in Washington as part of a group effort with other patriots from Arizona at the request of President Trump. We have another woman from Texas who said she entered the rotunda because, “He said be there, and so I went, I answered the call of my President.” We have dozens of such statements.
Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler said:
The video contains strong evidence that Trump did incite the insurrection, regardless of whether that was his intent. The rioter’s words “we were invited here” were exactly right, and the refrain “fight for Trump” was directly responsive to Trump’s demand. In criminal law, we would say this video proves the act but perhaps not the mental state – that Trump intended to cause the insurrection or knew it would happen as a result of his words.
It would be difficult to convict Trump in a criminal court because of the high level of proof required but the standard for impeachment is different. The circumstantial evidence, including Trump’s bellicose words, his reported glee at the invasion of the Capitol, and his failure to immediately speak out against the violence, and his ultimate stunningly weak admonition to the insurrectionists to “go home” should persuade most Senators that he was either intentional or extremely reckless. His culpability is enhanced because the stakes were so high – Trump seemed willing to risk people’s lives and our democracy in service of a lie about the integrity of the election.
At minimum, the video makes a strong case that everyone who illegally occupied the Capitol should be prosecuted – no member of that angry mob was an innocent bystander (plus the idea that prosecuting roughly 800 people would overwhelm the courts is ludicrous in a country where more than 10 million people are arrested each year)
I have no illusions any of this will persuade Republican senators to fulfill their oaths to render impartial justice any more than they were faithful in Trump’s first impeachment trial.