RIGHT SPEAK: Trump Eviscerates Democrats' Impeachment Charges; Trump Lawyers Counter Democrats With These 4 Impeachment Arguments

Trump Eviscerates Democrats' Impeachment Charges:

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s lawyers Bruce L. Castor Jr., and David Schoen released Trump’s answer to the Democrats’ article of impeachment accusing him of “incitement of insurrection.” Trump’s response breaks the Democrats’ impeachment article into eight separate allegations and responds to each claim. In a nutshell, the former president argues that it is unconstitutional for the Senate to remove a president when he has already left office and that he is innocent of the Democrats’ charges.

Trump asks the Senate to “dismiss Article I: Incitement of Insurrection against him as moot, and thus in violation of the Constitution, because the Senate lacks jurisdiction to remove from office a man who does not hold office. In the alternative, the 45th President respectfully requests the Senate acquit him on the merits of the allegations raised in the article of impeachment.”

The Senate already voted to take up the impeachment, with five Republican senators joining 50 Democratic senators in holding the matter constitutional. However, 45 Republican senators voted not to hold the trial, given constitutional concerns. This vote signified that the Senate is not likely to convict Trump.

The former president makes a few extremely salient arguments against the Democrats’ impeachment article. In addition to the claim that the Senate cannot convict a former president on impeachment, Trump argues that the Democrats violated his free speech and due process rights in rushing to impeach him and that the article of impeachment is deceptively drafted in an unfair manner. Trump also claims that disqualifying him from office would constitute a “bill of attainder,” which has been broadly interpreted to mean a legislative act against a class of people that inflicts punishment on them without a judicial trial.

Trump argues the article of impeachment is “facially and substantively flawed, and otherwise unconstitutional, and must be dismissed with prejudice.”

The president’s responses

Trump splits the article of impeachment into eight claims, providing a response to each one. --->READ MORE HERE

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Trump Lawyers Counter Democrats With These 4 Impeachment Arguments:

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers have fired back against House Democrats’ charge that he incited an insurrection.

Two Trump lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor, filed a 14-page counterbrief Tuesday, the same day Democrats’ impeachment managers made an 80-page filing.

The Trump brief denies that calling for supporters to “fight” is inciting a riot. It also disputes that the Senate has jurisdiction to hold an impeachment trial, since Trump became a private citizen again Jan. 20.

Here are key points made in the brief by Trump’s lawyers.

1. Trump Did Not Incite

Schoen and Castor assert that Trump’s Jan. 6 speech at a rally near the White House did not incite the deadly riot in which protesters broke into the Capitol.

Democrats’ impeachment managers specify that Trump’s telling the crowd to “fight like hell” prompted them to attack the Capitol.

“It is denied that the phrase ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore’ had anything to do with the action at the Capitol as it was clearly about the need to fight for election security in general, as evidenced by the recording of the speech,” the Trump legal team’s brief says. “It is denied that President Trump intended to interfere with the counting of electoral votes.”