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I just thought I’d remind you that this wasn’t some ancient history, even though it feels like it, especially if you’re watching the CPACers ramble about the Big Lie without mentioning that it led to on January 6th.

Republicans have continued to embrace the myth of a stolen election at the annual rightwing conclave of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), underscoring how the party continues to sustain the baseless idea months after Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 race and the deadly assault on the Capitol.

This year’s gathering of some of the party’s most fervent supporters has a staggering seven sessions focused on voter fraud and election-related issues. Several have inflammatory titles. “Other culprits, why judges and media refuse to look at the evidence,” was the name of one panel discussion on Friday. “The left pulled the strings, covered it up, and even admits it,” was another. “Failed states (GA, PA, NV, oh my!)” is the title of another scheduled for this weekend.‘

Several speakers on Friday repeated debunked falsehoods about the election. Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor, repeated the lie that there were “mysterious late-night ballot dumps” that swung the election for Joe Biden and that there were vehicles with out-of-state license plates unloading ballots in the early hours of the election. Both of those claims have been debunked.

Stoking fears about fraud and advocating for stricter voting rules has become commonplace among Republicans in recent years, but in the wake of Trump’s presidency – and his loss to Biden – it has become a common rallying cry in the party. Even so, some observers said the focus on fanning the flames of the conspiracy theory at CPAC was still alarming.

“One program on lessons learned from voting in 2020 is appropriate to restore trust for half of America, but not seven!” said Eric Johnson, a former Republican lawmaker in Georgia who advised Kelly Loeffler’s US Senate campaign.

“Donald Trump convinced his base – a majority of Republicans, if polls are to be believed – that the election was stolen. Though the CPAC organizers likely know it’s false, they’re using this as a wedge issue to excite the base and sell more tickets,” said Nick Pasternak, who recently left the Republican party after working on several GOP campaigns.

He added: “CPAC’s willingness to make the election lie such a big issue this year is a concerning symbol of what many in the party think – and what they’ll do.”

Even though dozens of judges across the country, including several appointed by Donald Trump, rejected claims of fraud after the election, Murdock and other speakers at CPAC accused judges of being unwilling to examine evidence of fraud.

Hans von Spakovsky, a well-known conservative who has agitated for more restrictive voting policies for years, claimed that judges were reluctant to look at evidence because they feared they would be attacked. “When it becomes an extraordinary election contest, one with national implications and one in which they risk being attacked by one of the political parties, the news media, their reluctance gets even greater,” he said.

Pressed whether judges were afraid to look at the evidence, Von Spakovsky added: “I think in some cases that is true, in other cases they might have had valid procedural grounds, but it sure didn’t look like it to me.”

Asked how much evidence of fraud there was now, Murdock falsely said: “It may be shredded by now.”

Jesse Binnall, an attorney who represented the Trump campaign in Nevada, complained about the short deadline lawyers had to put together a case after the election and claimed judges were pressured by media reporting that noted voter fraud was not a widespread problem. “Right or wrong, they never tried to dig into the facts about voter fraud,” he said. “Our legs were cut off before we even walked into the courthouse.”

Litigants in American courts have to meet procedural thresholds to advance their case, something that prevents courts from having to hear frivolous claims. Again and again, Trump and his allies failed to convince courts that they cleared those bars.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Matthew Braun, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, wrote in December as he tossed out an effort from Trump and his allies to block certification of the election results there. “Instead, this court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by the evidence.”Advertisement

The comments at CPAC underscore how Republicans continue to stoke uncertainty about the election. Even after judges and Republican and Democratic elected officials alike repeatedly examined allegations of wrongdoing and did not find fraud, they continue to insist that there is unexamined evidence.

State legislatures across the country are pushing new restrictions on voting, and there are at least 253 pending bills to restrict voting across the United States, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.

In his remarks on Friday, Von Spakovsky expressed support for efforts to restrict voting by mail, and said HR1, the bill pending in Congress that would require automatic and same-day registration among other reforms, was “the most anti-democratic bill I’ve ever seen during my 20 years in Washington”.

Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia, said the focus on elections was a way to gin up support among the party’s faithful base, which remains largely loyal to Trump and his allies.

“I would not equate ‘the party’ with CPAC so I wouldn’t put much stock in it from that perspective,” he said. “CPAC exists to make money and so it’s no surprise to me the organizers have jumped on to this issue as a way to drive engagement of their target market.”

Nah. Voting rights restrictions are their Holy Grail. White Supremacists have been doing this Black men were granted the right to vote in the 19th century and Trump’s GOP is full of them. His Big Lie provided them with a new excuse for doing more of it and they are already suing it to try to roll back voting in 43 states. Hans von Spakovsky has devoted his life to this project. He couldn’t be more thrilled.

Trump really should be a lot nicer to Mitch McConnell. He may have saved his bacon with his rank, partisan manipulation of the Supreme Court:

Lawsuits involving Donald Trump tore apart the Supreme Court while he was president, and the justices apparently remain riven by him.For nearly four months, the court has refused to act on emergency filings related to a Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena of Trump tax returns, effectively thwarting part of the investigation.

The Supreme Court’s inaction marks an extraordinary departure from its usual practice of timely responses when the justices are asked to block a lower court decision on an emergency basis and has spurred questions about what is happening behind the scenes.

Chief Justice John Roberts, based on his past pattern, may be trying to appease dueling factions among the nine justices, to avoid an order that reinforces a look of partisan politics. Yet paradoxically, the unexplained delay smacks of politics and appears to ensnarl the justices even more in the controversies of Trump.

The Manhattan investigation, led by District Attorney Cyrus Vance, continues to draw extensive public attention. The grand jury is seeking Trump personal and business records back to 2011. Part of the probe involves hush-money payments Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to cover up alleged affairs. (Trump has denied those allegations.)

For more than a year, Trump’s attorneys have raised challenges to prevent enforcement of the subpoena. The controversy appeared to culminate at the Supreme Court last July, when the justices rejected Trump’s claim that a sitting president is absolutely immune from criminal proceedings.

The 7-2 decision crafted by Roberts left some options for Trump on appeal, but lower court judges have since spurned Trump arguments, and his lawyers returned last fall to the high court for relief. Vance agreed to wait to enforce the long-pending subpoena until the justices acted on Trump’s emergency request. The Supreme Court’s lack of response has given Trump at least a temporary reprieve.

And his lawyers could soon seek more. CNN has learned that Trump’s legal team is preparing to submit a petition to the justices by early March, based on a standard deadline for appeals, asking them to hear the merits of Trump’s claim in oral arguments. In Trump’s October filing, his lawyers continued to maintain that the grand jury subpoena was overly broad and issued in bad faith to harass him. They said it “makes sweeping demands and … crosses the line — even were it aimed at some other citizen instead of the President.”

The process for a petition for certiorari, as it is called, could add months to the case. If the justices agreed to hear the dispute fully on the merits, resolution could be a year off. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment. Lawyers for Trump also declined to comment for the record.

When the latest round of litigation began, both sides premised their October filings on relatively quick court action and alerted the court to their pact requiring Vance to refrain from enforcement of the subpoena until the justices acted on the emergency request.The Trump team added that it would abide by an expedited schedule for its petition that the court hear oral arguments on the merits of the case.

The justices did not respond to that offer or to any part of the filing. Typically, soon after an emergency request and response are filed, the justices announce whether they will grant the requested “stay.” (A grant, rather than denial, takes five votes; the filings in this chapter of Trump v. Vance were complete on October 19.)

A majority of the justices might have opted against action close to the November 3 election, to avoid any signal for or against Trump in his quest to keep his tax returns private. But the election, the recounts, the Electoral College certification and the January 20 inauguration have all come and gone.

Now that Trump is out of office, the heart of the case tied to his role as president could be moot, irrelevant as a legal matter. But neither side has raised that possibility in a supplemental filing, nor have the justices raised the question in anything made public. And the election results have been known for months. In their initial October 13 request, Trump’s lead lawyers noted that Vance had agreed to earlier delays as the case progressed and argued, “His need to secure these records did not somehow become uniquely pressing in the last few weeks.”

Vance’s office countered that the grand jury has waited long enough. The DA’s office argued that the subpoena to Trump accountants Mazars USA had been issued in August 2019 and that the high court has warned in past cases against frustrating the public interest by delaying a grand jury’s work. “This litigation has already substantially hampered the grand jury’s investigation,” Vance’s team wrote.

Throughout the Trump presidency, cases involving Trump regularly split the justices. Disputes over his administration policies, such as the travel ban, often were decided by 5-4 votes. Controversies over his personal financial records appeared even more difficult. Yet Roberts was able to convince seven of the justices to join together in the July case of Trump v. Vance.

In elevated language and reference to the great Chief Justice John Marshall, Roberts wrote, “Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” Roberts emphasized the public interest in comprehensive access to evidence. The majority said, however, that Trump could return to lower courts to assert certain state law claims, including that the subpoena was too broad or issued in bad faith.

Trump’s lawyers indeed pressed those claims in a second round but were rejected by lower US appeals court judges. When a New York-based US appellate court ruled in early October, it said of the financial records sought, “There is nothing to suggest that these are anything but run-of-the mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”

Until October, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett succeeded the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court was divided 5-4 along ideological and political lines. It is now a 6-3 court, with the six Republican appointees generally voting conservative and the three remaining Democratic appointees voting liberal. On the 5-4 court, Roberts, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, was at the ideological middle. That is no longer the situation with the three Trump appointees in place.

That changed dynamic among the justices may be complicating consideration of the new Trump v. Vance case. Even in the momentous July ruling, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch (Trump’s first two appointees) concurred only in Roberts’ bottom-line judgment and expressed a competing rationale that could bolster a president’s ability to fight a subpoena. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The possible scenarios involving internal debate over Trump v. Vance are numerous, based on individual interests and regard for institutional integrity. Roberts may believe that airing differences privately over many months represents the best option, although it leaves the parties and public to wait and wonder.

If Trump’s lawyers still have no word by the first week in March, they would submit a petition asking that the merits of the case be put to oral arguments. Under current rules, apart from the “emergency” framework of this dispute, an individual who has lost in a lower court has 150 days from the date of that decision to petition the justices for review. If the individual has first made an emergency request to block the effect of the lower court ruling, the justices usually would have responded by either granting or denying the stay.

That’s because the party seeking court intervention would want immediate relief. Here, however, because Vance agreed to hold off on enforcement of the subpoena, his office, rather than the Trump side, is disadvantaged by the court’s inaction. The path the justices have taken — or, rather, not taken — has baffled lawyers following the case. Long known for its secretive ways, the court has added a new dimension of mystery with Trump v. Vance. All that’s evident is the justices have diverged from long-standing practice and hindered the investigation of a former president.

Gee, I wonder why?

They’re going to protect him, aren’t they? All of our fantasies about legal ramifications for Trump, both criminally and civilly are probably going nowhere. Packing the courts may have been McConnell’s greatest gift to Trump. He really should be more grateful.

Honestly, my feeling is that Donald Trump will die a rich, free, man in his bed at the age of 96. Life doesn’t always offer up real karma for the worst people, especially the ones who are rich, white and politically powerful. What I don’t know is if he can manage to totally destroy the country before he goes.

In this interview Jamie Raskin outlines in clear terms what they thought Trump was up to on January 6th:

Placing former vice president Mike Pence front and center was not a strategic choice for the impeachment managers; it was a recognition that Pence was the central player in the former president’s attempted coup. “There was a method to all [his] madness. This was the counting of the electoral votes,” Raskin said. Trump seemed to think that if he could just get Pence to throw out votes from a few states, that would stop the election’s certification and “he could deny the election to Joe Biden.”

Under this thinking, the election’s outcome would go to a vote in the House, and Trump could “declare martial law” to put down the violence. “Vice President Pence became the linchpin” in this fanciful scenario. That is why Trump called Pence the morning of Jan. 6 and reportedly told him, “You can either go down in history as a patriot” or as an epithet[a pussy].

Raskin said, “The American people understand who Donald Trump is. That kind of authoritarian relationship is a threat to democracy.”

Mike Pence knows this first hand, as does Rudy Giuliani and any number of Trump’s confidantes. It really was an attempted coup. And when Pence refused to go along, Trump sicced his violent mob on him, hoping that would delay the vote and persuade him to change his mind out of fear for his life.

This happened.

This interview with Evangelical superstar preacher Eric Metaxas is mind-blowing. Seriously looney tunes, off the charts crazy:

The PR pitch was brazen: Eric Metaxas, it declared, is “America’s #1 Bad Christian.” The Christian writer and radio host has been promoting doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, including ata prayer rally he emceed on the National Mall in December. Metaxas has tweeted “martial rhetoric” in defense of former President Donald Trump, his publicist wrote cheerfully. He even appeared ina New York Times article about Christian extremism. Oh, and by the way, he has a new book out…

Metaxas sees himself and other evangelical Trump supporters as part of a long line of Christians who stood up against grave wrongdoings in history: William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist and evangelical; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian who was arrested and later hanged for his dissent against the Nazi regime. Metaxas has spent his career writing books about these figures and has a tendency to describe current events in dramatic historical terms. “If this isn’t our ‘Reichstag Fire’ I don’t know what is,” he tweeted on January 27, commenting on the Department of Homeland Security’s warnings about the potential for domestic terrorism following the Capitol attack. In 1933, Hitler’s government used a fire at the Reichstag, which housed the German Parliament, as a pretext to consolidate power and suppress dissent. Metaxas’s tweet suggested that he thought the Biden administration was using the Capitol attack to do the same.

President Joe Biden’s inauguration has not made Metaxas and the Trump supporters who agree with him go away. In fact, Metaxas has become only more vocal—and seemingly fearful—in recent weeks. He believes, without evidence, that there was significant fraud in the 2020 election. (Some three-quarters of Republicans agree, according to a December poll.) And like roughly one-third of registered voters, he doesn’t believe that Biden’s victory was legitimate. I wanted to understand why Metaxas, who lives in Manhattan and has spent much of his life among journalists and his fellow Yale graduates, has come to believe that he is righteous for questioning the 2020 election. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Emma Green: Do you see yourself as a rebel against elite consensus?

Eric Metaxas: I grew up in a working-class, immigrant environment. When I went to Yale, that was the first time I was among the so-called cultural elites. There really is a kind of enforced consensus. If you don’t think that way, you can quickly become persona non grata.

I wasn’t in D.C. for the Capitol riots. But I was blown away at how instantly anybody who supported Trump—which is, you know, half the country—was demonized as potential white domestic terrorists. I just thought, Holy cow. What am I, in Nazi Germany? This is really sick. That’s not what we do in America.

Green: You brought up Nazi Germany there, and I want to make sure I understand how you’re using the metaphor.

Metaxas: You have to forgive me. Part of the reason I bring up Germany, always, is because I spent a huge part of my life studying that period. I wrote a 600-page book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We can’t allow people to be silenced. People immediately say, “You bring up the Nazis? That’s out of bounds.” But it’s the principle of the thing. When you start pushing people around and telling them what they can say—and they better say, “Heil Hitler,” loudly—that should be a warning sign.

Green: Do you believe that Trump supporters are like Jews in Hitler’s Germany?

Metaxas: Now, Emma, you’re trying to get me to say something. That’s a good journalistic tactic. I can see the quote, right? That’s not really going to be helpful, because: Of course not.

The point is, in Germany, if you didn’t go along with the party line, you would be demonized. You would get in trouble. People just think, I hope I don’t get in trouble, so what do I have to say or not say to get in trouble? At that moment, you cease to be free.

We’re kind of getting there. Even a millimeter in that direction is too close for comfort for me.

Green: You have tweeted about the early actions of the Biden administration being similar to the Reichstag fire. You tweeted that—

Metaxas: No, no, no. The Capitol. I’m referring to that.

This event happens, and before the smoke clears, we are using the opportunity—and I’m not talking about the Biden administration; I’m talking about the Democratic establishment and the media—instantly seizing on it to demonize, in the harshest terms, anyone who would support Trump. That just blew my mind. I thought: You don’t do that in America. That’s what the Nazis did with the Reichstag fire. Before the smoke cleared, they had already figured out who they were going to blame.

Green: I just want to be clear about the metaphor here, because I think it matters. The attack on the Capitol was perpetrated by a group of people who had, in some cases, weapons, and who forcefully broke into the United States Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes. I don’t think the argument is that anybody who voted for Trump anywhere in America is a violent white supremacist. I think the criticism has been about that act and the way in which President Trump, along with those who have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results, encouraged that act.

Metaxas: But it’s our right in America to do that—to question things. And when you are told that by doing that, you are contributing to violence, you are inciting violence—that, right there, is a red flag.

The media landscape was not what you just described. It was an absolute pile-on. You’d think somebody had clubbed a senator to death or something. I was just scratching my head, trying to make sense of whatever happened, if we even know what happened. There are enough questions that it’s so confusing. They were acting like people were shot.

Green: I want to stop you there, because a Capitol Police officer was beaten to death by protesters. He died of his injuries.

Metaxas: Look, I’m not a newshound. But I didn’t even seem to get clarity on who were the human beings that committed murder. I don’t know anybody who is pro-murder. What is there to be said except, obviously, we condemn it. Who the heck wouldn’t condemn that? Why would somebody harm a police officer? Even I can’t make sense of what’s going on. Who did this? Are they in jail? Is there a trial? Is it clear why they did that?

Green: I want to bring up something you said on your radio show in conversation with President Trump. You said you’d “be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us.” What did you mean by that? And would you still be willing—

Metaxas: I meant exactly what Nathan Hale meant when he said, “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country.” When you believe liberty is being threatened; when you believe elections are being threatened; when you believe that any of these things are being threatened—people have died for these things. When you say something like that, what you’re saying is: I would, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or like Nathan Hale, stand up for what I think is right and true. I am not just going to go with the crowd.

The values that I get out of the Bible have led to American-style self-government and liberty and freedom for all. Of course I said I would be happy to die in that fight.

Green: When you said “that fight,” it seemed like you were referring to the fight to make sure President Trump would be inaugurated to a second term.

Metaxas: No, no, no, no, no. The fight to make sure that all Americans could say, whoever won, we know that really happened.

This is not about Trump. If he lost, good! The American people can elect their leaders. But if that’s not really clear, then you’re harming the whole fabric. I was really upset at how a lot of people just didn’t seem troubled by it. They would say things like, “Oh! There’s no evidence.” I’ve seen enough to make me think that a really thorough investigation is necessary. And that didn’t happen.

Green: But there were investigations into allegations of irregularities. Attorney General Bill Barr said the DOJ looked into all allegations of voter fraud, and they didn’t uncover anything on a scale that would change the outcome of the election. Republican officials at the state level—Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, for example—said things went according to plan.

Is that not persuasive to you? Do you believe President Trump was actually reelected?

Metaxas: I think it’s very possible he was reelected, yeah. And that sickens me, that I could even think that. I’ve seen enough to make me doubt that we had a fair election, that every person’s vote was counted the way it’s supposed to be counted.

I think a lot of people thought it was too much trouble to get into these weeds—“Let’s just let it ride and leave it alone.” And a lot of courts didn’t look at the evidence, because they made a call, which was actually a political call, to say, “We just don’t want to stick our necks out on this.”

Green: But many of the courts you’re talking about are ones where judges appointed by Trump were looking at the evidence. Why do you think even people who were vetted by President Trump’s team would make a political calculation that it wasn’t worthwhile to consider challenges of the highest order and seriousness in America, which is that our elections weren’t free and fair?

Metaxas: I’m not the sort of person who followed this the way you did. Most Americans have less time to follow it than I did. And so if there is the impression that some of what I’m saying is true, people need to deal with that. In America, we don’t push that stuff aside.

It gets even nuttier> It’s quite clear he believes Trump is a martyr, maybe even the second coming.

Green: Some people have argued that the reputation of Christianity has been damaged by evangelicals’ wide support of President Trump. I take it you don’t agree with that.

Metaxas: I think that’s preposterous! Of course not. That’s just such a silly thing. The idea that I’m supposed to bury all of my thoughts for the hope of perhaps persuading somebody in the future that Christianity is palatable or something—Christians have traditionally stood up for human rights! When you stand up against the slave trade, you become incredibly politically unpopular. I mean, Wilberforce was totally demonized in his day. But he was doing what he felt was the right thing. What kind of a Christian would he have been if he said, “Well, I don’t want to be divisive”?

Defending Trump, a blatant, unreconstructed racist and xenophobe, to Wilberforce who fought to end the slave trade in England is just:

I don’t have the energy to take apart his argument and I’m sure I don’t need to. It’s obvious that he’s completely deluded.

He’s also a violent asshole. Here’s footage of him sucker punching a protester in the back of the head at the White House RNC convention in August:

https://twitter.com/JustInTime_2020/status/1299365181898797058?s=20

They arrested the guy he punched.

Trump pretty much put out a hit on him on January 6th and Pence hasn’t had a word to say about it:

On January 6, a horde of pro-Trump rioters breached the United States Capitol with one bloodthirsty mission in mind: to stop Vice President Mike Pence from carrying out his constitutional obligation to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.

Even if it meant killing him.

Makeshift gallows were erected on the West side of the complex. Members of the mob shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” as they stormed the halls of Congress, hunting for the vice president, as well as any other officials they could get their hands on. Well over 100 police officers were injured and maimed by the mob; Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed. Two Capitol Hill Police officers later committed suicide.

And to this day, the former vice president hasn’t had a word to say about his experience.

Throughout Trump’s impeachment, Pence remained mute. As someone who could provide both important facts—what did Trump know about the situation, when, and what was his reaction—and bear witness to Trump’s state of mind in the days and hours leading up to the attack, Pence was in a rare, possibly even unique, position. Over the course of the weeks following the election, Pence had been a perpetrator of Trump’s big election lie and at the final hour became a target of it. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was one of the 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment and who came forward with her blockbuster testimony during the Senate trial, begged Pence to share what he knew.

He refused.

Pence’s silence could easily be chalked up to all manner of causes: submissiveness, cowardice, fear, or naked political calculation.

Or maybe it’s something worse.

Ask yourself: Why would Mike Pence bother lifting his voice in defense of his own life if no one else in his party cares to do so?

If you think about it from this perspective, then Pence’s silence isn’t just complicity. It’s another marker of the nihilism that has taken over the Republican party, whereby nothing matters except for Trump and/or owning the libs.

And in order to further this project, Republicans see themselves as bound to acquiesce in the face of any evil.

Mike Pence was a high-value target for Trump’s shock troops on January 6, all because he was the man with the final hand on certifying Biden’s election victory. This means that the 64 Republican House members and 44 Republican senators who also supported Biden’s certification are marked. After all, if Pence was guilty of a treasonous sin against Trump, punishable by death, it follows to reason that they are, too.

And still, 197 House Republicans voted against the article of impeachment and 43 Senate Republicans voted to acquit.

Or, to put it another way: More than twice as many Republicans voted to defend Trump in impeachment than voted against the coup. Most of the people marked by the mob voted to excuse Trump’s role in summoning the mob.

“Move on,” they say.

An attack on their lives isn’t enough for them to break with Trump.

Say what you will about Mike Pence: He knows his tribe.

That’s Amanda carpenter at the Bulwark. Yes, the great evangelical hope who won’t even be alone in the presence of a woman not his wife, has acquiesced to evil.

Here are just a few of the whoppers Trump’s lame defense team threw into the trial yesterday, courtesy of CNN’s Daniel Dale:

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers mounted an aggressive defense Friday in Trump’s second impeachment trial — and made multiple false and misleading claims to bolster their case.Arguing that Trump did nothing to incite the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, the lawyers distorted the facts about both what happened that day and what happened in the past.Here is a fact check of some of their claims:

Defense team misleadingly omits Trump remarks defending violence

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen highlighted comments from Democrats that he suggested had promoted or defended violence. Trump, he argued, is different than these Democrats.”Contrast the President’s repeated condemnations of violence with the rhetoric from his opponents,” van der Veen said. He then played a video that juxtaposed clips of Trump condemning violence, and calling himself an “ally of all peaceful protesters,” with some selectively edited clips of Democrats.

Facts First: This argument and video were 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.

Among other things, Trump has done the following since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015: praised a Republican congressman for assaulting a journalist; urged police officers not to worry about injuring the heads of suspects they are arresting; said he would like to punch a protester in the face; urged supporters to “knock the crap out of” any protester they saw holding a tomato; said a kidnapping plot against Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer might not be an actual “problem”; approvingly told a fake story about an early 20th century US general who massacred Muslim terrorists with bullets dipped in the blood of pigs; said it was a “beautiful sight” when the authorities tossed a journalist to the ground during unrest in Minneapolis; mocked a reporter who got shot with a rubber bullet; and applauded the Trump supporters who surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus on the highway, an incident that prompted an FBI investigation.

Trump’s lawyer falsely claims Trump’s first two tweets during the Capitol attack urged calm

Van der Veen claimed that “the first two messages the President sent via Twitter once the incursion of the Capitol began” urged people to “stay peaceful” and called for “no violence.”

Facts First: This is not true.Trump’s “stay peaceful” tweet at 2:38 p.m. and “no violence” tweet at 3:13 p.m. were his second and third tweeted messages after the Capitol was breached, not his first. Trump’s first tweet was at 2:24 p.m.: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”Rioters had already entered the US Capitol building by the time of the Trump tweet about Pence.

No, the media wan’t lying that there was hacking during the 2016 election

Van der Veen claimed that Washington officials other than Trump are the ones who used reckless and inflammatory rhetoric. He claimed: “The entire Democratic Party and national news media spent the last four years repeating without any evidence that the 2016 election had been hacked.”

Facts First: The Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign were indeed hacked during the 2016 election campaign; this is a fact, not a claim made “without any evidence.” The US intelligence community, special counsel Robert Mueller and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee all concluded that the Russian government was responsible for stealing and leaking internal documents and emails.

If van der Veen was suggesting that the “entire Democratic Party and national media” spent four years falsely alleging that hackers altered actual votes or vote totals in the 2016 election, that would not be true either. We can’t speak for every word uttered by every Democrat or every journalist since 2016, but it is clearly inaccurate to say that the entire party or entire media spent four years pushing such a claim. The national discussion about hacking during the 2016 election focused on the actual, confirmed hacking that targeted the Democrats’ computer systems.

Castor falsely claims rioters didn’t attend Trump’s DC speech

Trump’s lawyer Bruce Castor claimed that the rioters who stormed the Capitol didn’t attend the ex-President’s incendiary speech that day, and that this proved the insurrection was a pre-planned attack that wasn’t incited by Trump.

“Given the timeline of events, the criminals at the Capitol weren’t there at the Ellipse to even hear the President’s words,” Castor said. “They were more than a mile away, engaged in their pre-planned assault on this very building.”

“This was a pre-planned assault,” Castor said, “make no mistake.” He also claimed this assertion was “confirmed by the FBI, Department of Justice and even the House managers.”

Facts First: It’s false that none of the accused Capitol rioters attended Trump’s speech beforehand. And Castor is exaggerating the known facts about whether the assault was pre-planned.

Ellipse to the CapitolIt’s true that the timeline shows that someone who attended the entirety of the speech at the Ellipse could not have been among the very first people to breach the Capitol grounds. But that’s a much narrower claim than the one Trump’s lawyers are making.Court documents and video footage show that some Trump supporters did make this walk from the Ellipse to the Capitol, undermining Castor’s claims. This includes one woman who allegedly went from the Trump speech to her hotel, and then into the Capitol.

And all of this ignores the fact that insurrectionists near the Capitol could have listened to Trump’s speech on their phones or could have been inspired by Trump’s previous rhetoric.

Pre-planned?The Justice Department and FBI have accused some rioters of planning the attacks before coming to Washington, and top prosecutors have said more charges along those lines are expected. But only a handful of the 200-plus criminal cases indicate that rioters had showed up that day intending to breach the Capitol.

Therefore, Castor cherry-picked a few unrepresentative cases from the pool of more than 215 cases to support his misleading assertion that federal investigators “confirmed” this was a “pre-planned assault.”In interviews with reporters and FBI investigators, some of the rioters said they came to DC for the rally and later got swept up in the crowd as it rushed the Capitol.

No, Georgia did not see a ‘dramatic drop’ in ballot rejection rates

As evidence of Trump’s efforts to subvert the certification of the 2020 election results, the article of impeachment cites Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where Trump asked Raffensperger “to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn the Georgia presidential election results.”Castor argued Trump’s use of the word “find” was “solely related to his concerns with the inexplicable dramatic drop in Georgia’s ballot rejection rates.”

Facts First: The intent of Trump’s use of the word “find” aside, Georgia did not experience a “dramatic drop” in ballot rejection rates, according to data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.In fact, the total number of absentee ballot rejections increased in direct proportion to the number of additional votes compared to the most recent past election. But ultimately, the percentage of ballot rejections remained the same. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office noted that “the rejection rate for absentee ballots with missing or non-matching signatures in the 2020 General Election was 0.15%, the same rejection rate for signature issues as the 2018 General Election.”Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling reacted to Castor’s claim on Twitter Friday, stating that “shockingly, the disinformation continues.”

Trump lawyers misleadingly use Biden comment on peaceful protest

Trump’s lawyers argued that Democrats had taken Trump’s words out of context. Castor argued that the House managers had used “selective editing and manipulated visuals.”But the Trump defense team itself clearly did selectively edit its video presentations. For example, moments before this Castor complaint, he had played a video that showed then-candidate Joe Biden saying, of last year’s racial justice protests, “The vast majority of — of the protests have been peaceful.” The video then cut immediately to footage of rioting, suggesting that Biden’s claim was wrong.

Facts First: This video cut was misleading. Biden was correct when he said that the vast majority of racial justice protests in 2020 were peaceful; he was not describing riots as peaceful. Biden has repeatedly condemned rioting.

The video played by Castor was reminiscent of tactics used by Trump’s unsuccessful reelection campaign. Trump himself had inaccurately attempted to convince Americans that Biden had described violence as peaceful protest.

Trump lawyers falsely claim trial violated due process

Van der Veen argued that the impeachment process was unconstitutional, in part because it violated the due process clause.”The due process clause applies to this impeachment hearing and it’s been severely and extremely violated,” he said.

Facts First:This is false. An impeachment inquiry is a political process, not a criminal case, therefore the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, such as due process, do not apply.

The Fifth Amendment, which outlines the right to due process, states that it applies specifically to any criminal case. And as Steve Vladeck, a Supreme Court analyst for CNN and professor at the University of Texas law school, noted ahead of Trump’s first impeachment, “Impeachment is not a criminal prosecution.”

Furthermore, William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University, told CNN, “There is nothing in the Constitution or any law, nor any rules of the House, that prescribes a particular procedure for impeachment proceedings.”The Constitution details only the basis for impeachment, the potential consequences of impeachment and that the House “shall have the sole power of impeachment” while the Senate “shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.”

Well, all hell broke loose today in the impeachment trial and Trump’s lawyer lost it. Perhaps you saw it?

"That's the way it works, folks … I don't know why you're laughing … there's nothing laughable here" — the Senate chamber breaks out in laughter after van der Veen threatens to depose Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris not by Zoom, but in his office in Philadelphia pic.twitter.com/T0xiozHckE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 13, 2021

Tom had the story underlying that call for witnesses this morning. And here’s Jonathan Chait on the reason why the Kevin McCarthy call is so significant:

There has always been one small hole in the prosecution’s case for Donald Trump’s second impeachment. Trump encouraged a public demonstration, promised in advance it would be “wild,” instructed his supporters that extraordinary measures were needed to save the republic from his “landslide” election being stolen, and repeatedly urged them to take off the gloves and fight dirtier. But there’s been no evidence that Trump knew beforehand that his supporters would actually break into the Capitol building.

Last night CNN added a key new piece of evidence: In an angry phone call with then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy during the insurrection, Trump refused to call off his supporters, and praised them for their commitment to his cause.

According to CNN, and confirmed by Republican representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a witness to the call, McCarthy pleaded with the president to make a public statement to end the riot. Trump at first told McCarthy the rioters were “antifa.” (This is in keeping with his habit of privately repeating lines to his supporters that both know are lies, like the way he instructed Michael Cohen to testify “there’s no business with Russia” when both were perfectly aware there had been.) When McCarthy insisted on correcting him, Trump switched to a new line: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

This is extraordinarily incriminating. Not only was Trump taking sides with the rioters after they had violently sacked the Capitol, he was leveraging the violent threat they posed to pressure McCarthy to work more energetically to defend him.

Indeed, Trump continued his attempts to pressure Republicans to support his attempt to overturn the election results after this call with McCarthy. One of those attempts is known, because he mistakenly called Senator Mike Lee when he meant to reach Senator Tommy Tuberville. Rather than stop the attack, Herrera Beutler writes, “[Trump] and his lawyer were busy making calls to senators who were still in lockdown, seeking their support to further delay the Electoral College certification.”

Yesterday, Michael van der Veen, Trump’s impeachment lawyer, claimed that “at no point” was Trump aware that Mike Pence was in physical danger on January 6. A source close to Pence tells CNN that is false.

Trump created the conditions for his most deranged supporters to commit violence. It was not inevitable that his incendiary rhetoric would lead them to a physical invasion, nor was it inevitable that the invasion would overwhelm the Capitol’s defenses, though he bears responsibility for elevating the risks.

But his behavior afterward is what truly damns him. When the demonstration took a violent turn and the violence overwhelmed law enforcement, Trump had a choice. He could have seen it as a tragic turn of events. Or he could have seen it as a lucky break. He saw it as a lucky break, and set out to use the violent threat as the final effort to overturn the results and install himself in office for a second, unelected term.

And that was obvious from the lame tweets and videos he sent out during the insurrection.

He never condemned their actions.

This is how a real president reacted that day:

President-elect Biden addresses the nation: https://t.co/BXM3SZK25R

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 6, 2021

Donald John Trump, former U.S. president, is on trial in the U.S. Senate for incitement of insurrection. Among other absurdities his defense team argued on Friday was that Trump had been denied due process. He had certainly denied himself competent lawyers. They concluded his defense case after only 2½ hours.

Trump’s attorneys used up the first hour-plus arguing that the House managers had deliberately omitted from their presentations information Team Trump considered exculpatory. In essesnce, Trump’s lawyers complained that the prosecution had not used its time to make the defense’s case for them.

Much of it was whataboutism and distraction. At one point, Trump’s own lawyers spotlighted his calls into Georgia for which he is under criminal investigation. They argued that since his hour-long call to pressure Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger into falsifying state election results was never meant to be public (Raffensperger released a recording), Trump could not have intended to incite the Jan. 6 insurrection. They mischaracaterized Georgia’s elections results, of course.

The Washington Post team summarized:

Yet their presentation was rife with the sort of falsehoods that marked Trump’s campaign and his unsuccessful effort to overturn the election results. Lawyers spread Trump’s contention that President Biden did not actually win the state of Georgia, implied that antifa and other leftists were involved in planning of the attack of the Capitol and accused Democratic House managers of withholding key evidence.

As those arguments unfolded, Trump’s lawyers declined to be specific on questions about Trump’s own behavior while rioters broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to block the final certification of Biden’s victory over Trump, such as precisely when he found out about the violence, what he knew about Vice President Mike Pence’s safety and whether he took any action to limit the insurrection.

On that last matter, Trump’s attorneys bobbed, weaved and evaded. For good reason. There is mounting evidence Trump sided with the insurrectionist mob, including this statement issued Friday night from a Washington state Republican House member:

pic.twitter.com/6N8vg5PRJz

— Jaime Herrera Beutler (@HerreraBeutler) February 13, 2021

Otherwise, Bruce Castor, David Schoen and Michael van der Veen deployed the “whatabout defense” taught in the nation’s top law schools. Or they argued that rules that apply in a court case were being violated in what attorneys in Trump’s first impeachment reminded the Senate ad nauseam is a political trial. Or they accused House managers of trying to disqualify Trump from ever again holding office — the express purpose of impeachment stated in Article I, section 3, clause 7.

It was a travesty. Digby posted a detailed takedown from The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis last night.

The Bulwark’s Benjamin Parker had additional observations:

(3) Multiple members of “the 45th president’s” legal team decried “hatred” in politics.

By which they meant the hatred Democrats have for Trump, which they claim was the motivation for this second impeachment.

Trump’s lawyers did not see “hatred” as the motivation that led people to destroy public property, disrupt congressional proceedings, erect gallows, and attack and murder police officers on January 6.

This insane view didn’t even rise to the level of false equivalence.

(4) At one point, van der Veen looked directly toward the House impeachment managers and claimed, “Either words matter or they don’t.” He should take his own advice.

Van der Veen also suggested to the Senate that convicting Trump because of his speech would be a violation of the former—sorry, 45th president’s free speech rights. He even read the First Amendment aloud: “Congress shall make no law…”

But of course impeachment isn’t a law. Either words matter or they don’t.

(5) Van der Veen went on to suggest that to violate Trump’s rights in such a brazen manner (bear with me here) would somehow be a violation of the senators’ oaths.

Yes, you read that right.

A lawyer defending Donald Trump thought it was a good idea to bring up violation of oaths of office as a reason to acquit the former president who incited an insurrection against the U.S. government.

“When you’re making these kinds of made-for-Fox News arguments, you know you don’t really have a good defense,” Lewis wrote.

It promises to be no better when proceedings resume today at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Now, if only House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy could be called to tesify.

Let your U.S. senators know what you think about Rep. Herrera Beutler’s statement RIGHT NOW! And if their office won’t pick up (it’s Saturday), free e-fax them.

He knew what he was doing when he sent the tweet calling Pence a coward as his rabid Red Hats hunted the halls of the Capitol looking for him.

Donald Trump posted a tweet attacking his own vice president for lacking “the courage” to overturn the election for him ― enraging his Jan. 6 mob even further ― just minutes after learning that Mike Pence had been removed from the Senate chamber for his own safety.

Newly elected Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told reporters Wednesday night, following the second day of the former president’s impeachment trial, that Trump had called for his help in delaying election certification the afternoon of the U.S. Capitol attack but he had told Trump that Pence had just been taken from the Senate and he couldn’t talk just then.

“He didn’t get a chance to say a whole lot because I said, ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out. I’ve got to go,’” Tuberville said.

According to video footage from that day, Pence was removed from the Senate at 2:14 p.m. after rioters had broken into the Capitol, meaning that when Trump lashed out at Pence at 2:24 p.m., he already knew Pence’s life was in danger.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump wrote in his tweet.

Videos shown by Democratic House members presenting their impeachment case document that rioters were aware of Trump’s tweet. Some had erected a gallows outside the Capitol. Others roamed the halls, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”

The exact time Pence was taken from the Senate following the breach of the Capitol by the mob Trump had incited to try to overturn the presidential election was known the day of the attack, as was the time of Trump’s tweet. What was not known until Tuberville’s statement was whether Trump was aware of the danger Pence was in at the time he posted his tweet.

Did he think his mob might kill Pence? It almost certainly crossed his mind. The man is obsessed with vengeance. He admits it.

Here’s another story about Republicans changing their party affiliation:

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the phone lines and websites of local election officials across the country were jumping: Tens of thousands of Republicans were calling or logging on to switch their party affiliations.

In California, more than 33,000 registered Republicans left the party during the three weeks after the Washington riot. In Pennsylvania, more than 12,000 voters left the G.O.P. in the past month, and more than 10,000 Republicans changed their registration in Arizona.

An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for G.O.P. registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.

Among those who recently left the party are Juan Nunez, 56, an Army veteran in Mechanicsburg, Pa. He said he had long felt that the difference between the United States and many other countries was that campaign-season fighting ended on Election Day, when all sides would peacefully accept the result. The Jan. 6 riot changed that, he said.

“What happened in D.C. that day, it broke my heart,” said Mr. Nunez, a lifelong Republican who is preparing to register as an independent. “It shook me to the core.”

The biggest spikes in Republicans leaving the party came in the days after Jan. 6, especially in California, where there were 1,020 Republican changes on Jan. 5 — and then 3,243 on Jan. 7. In Arizona, there were 233 Republican changes in the first five days of January, and 3,317 in the next week. Most of the Republicans in these states and others switched to unaffiliated status.

Does this add up to anything? I don’t know. But polling seems to show about 20-25% of Republicans unhappy with the even more radical turn of the party. No wonder Mitch keeps trying to signal that Republicans can “follow their conscience” in the impeachment trial. Some of them are facing re-election in 2022 in states with a purple hue. They can’t afford to lose any more voters.

And then there’s this, which could cause some other problems if it gets any traction:

Dozens of former Republican officials, who view the party as unwilling to stand up to former President Donald Trump and his attempts to undermine U.S. democracy, are in talks to form a center-right breakaway party, four people involved in the discussions told Reuters.

The early stage discussions include former elected Republicans, former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, ex-Republican ambassadors and Republican strategists, the people involved say.

More than 120 of them held a Zoom call last Friday to discuss the breakaway group, which would run on a platform of “principled conservatism,” including adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law – ideas those involved say have been trashed by Trump.

The plan would be to run candidates in some races but also to endorse center-right candidates in others, be they Republicans, independents or Democrats, the people say.

Evan McMullin, who was chief policy director for the House Republican Conference and ran as an independent in the 2016 presidential election, told Reuters that he co-hosted the Zoom call with former officials concerned about Trump’s grip on Republicans and the nativist turn the party has taken.

Three other people confirmed to Reuters the call and the discussions for a potential splinter party, but asked not to be identified.

Among the call participants were John Mitnick, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; former Republican congressman Charlie Dent; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff in the Homeland Security Department under Trump; and Miles Taylor, another former Trump homeland security official.

The talks highlight the wide intraparty rift over Trump’s false claims of election fraud and the deadly Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Most Republicans remain fiercely loyal to the former president, but others seek a new direction for the party.

The House of Representatives impeached Trump on Jan. 13 on a charge of inciting an insurrection by exhorting thousands of supporters to march on the Capitol on the day Congress was gathered to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.

Call participants said they were particularly dismayed by the fact that more than half of the Republicans in Congress – eight senators and 139 House representatives – voted to block certification of Biden’s election victory just hours after the Capitol siege.

Most Republican senators have also indicated they will not support the conviction of Trump in this week’s Senate impeachment trial.

“Large portions of the Republican Party are radicalizing and threatening American democracy,” McMullin told Reuters. “The party needs to recommit to truth, reason and founding ideals or there clearly needs to be something new.”

Gor for it. If former Republicans are uncomfortable in the Democratic Party then maybe they do need a third party. And it will be the third party because Trump’s GOP isn’t going anywhere.

Asked about the discussions for a third party, Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said: “These losers left the Republican Party when they voted for Joe Biden.”

There you have it. Republicans who voted for Biden are losers who left the party. Are the losers listening? I hope so.