In the wake of the former president’s exoneration over an article of impeachment claiming incitement to insurrection, his lawyers as well as allies have attempted to smear the trial by claiming that House impeachment officers resorted making evidence.
The claims are unsubstantiated and aren’t strong enough to withstand examination. They provide those such as Trump Attorney Michael van der Veen and Donald Trump Jr. with the opportunity to appear on the air and protest about how unfairly Donald Trump was treated.
In a Saturday appearance on CBS which has been watched more than 10 million times since the article was posted, van der Veen went to go as far as to compare the January 6 protest which killed five people with Trump’s treatment in his impeachment trials.
“What happened at the Capitol on January 6 is absolutely horrific, but what happened at the Capitol during this trial was not too far away from that,” said the judge. “The prosecutors in this case doctored evidence.”
Zak’s description of van der Veen’s claims was precise. However, before she could complete her query, van der Veen -possibly aware of how weak his claims seem when presented in this manner hit back.
“Wait for a minute, wait,”wait, wait, are you sure that’s sufficient for you? No, no, no. It’s not acceptable to prescribe just a tiny bit of proof,” He said. saying later: “I can’t believe you are asking me a question that suggests it’s acceptable to modify just a tiny amount of proof.”
Van der Veen’s shrewd performance was highly applauded in the eyes of right-wing commentators. Not as revealing, but just as revealing was the appearance of Donald Trump Jr.’s appearance on Monday’s episode of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, when the president went so far as to suggest that House management should be put in jail.
“The reality is this: If this wasn’t a kangaroo court, you’d have the Republicans clamoring to go after the supposed prosecution for literally manufacturing evidence,” the judge declared. “I think about it, imagine if a prosecutor in America had to fabricate evidence against witnesses. This would be a felony crime. They’d be barred and exiled from their posts and removed from their positions and impeached. This is what we should do here, when they’re producing fake checkmarks, changing tweets, and doing everything to make it appear as though they’re doing so.”
But, van der Veen and Don Jr. are trying to portray it like Trump’s second impeachment trials were just another part of the anti-Trump witch-hunt. They’re betting that the public won’t have the time to study the validity of the allegations they’re making because there’s nothing evidence there.
The outrage is performed and not substantive
There are claims that the House impeachment committee manipulating evidence first surfaced at the time of Trump lawyer David Schoen’s testimony during the Friday’s segment in the impeachment trial in which he stated, “We have reason to believe the House managers manipulated evidence and selectively edited footage.”
Schoen’s aim was to undermine the prosecution’s case through questioning the House managers in their credibility, but his specific instances he mentioned were not relevant to their argument.
One of them was the image in an New York Times article in which the prosecutor, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is shown in the process of preparing the trial, while looking at a computer screen that displays the Trump tweet with an incorrect date on the bottom. Schoen used this image to argue that Democrats are preparing evidence, but as he acknowledged, the mistake was fixed prior to trial.
The other allegations that were made of Schoen and van der Veen were similarly insignificant. One of them was related to the year mentioned in the Trump tweet that was displayed by the management during the trial . It read “2021” instead of “2020.” Another one had to do with be related to an account on Twitter that was retweeted and retweeted Trump was displayed in blue with the checkmark verify badge when was in fact not verified. Schoen also was a bit sceptical against the prosecutor about spelling mistakes on tweets that Trump tweeted and also claimed that Democrats for “selectively editing” footage presented in the trial by showing videos of Trump’s January 6 pre-insurrection speech instead of the longer portions of the speech. (The reason for this is that Trump once , in passing, encouraged his followers to be peaceful during a speech during which the president mentioned “fighting” more than 20 times, that’s not the claim that he sparked any kind of violence.)
To be precise, the differences in the tweets may be legitimate errors, however they had no impact on the nature of the tweets that were in question, or the content that was the basis of House managers’ argument. As an adviser for the House managers said when Schoen made light of these differences, the mistakes were caused by prosecutors having to reconstruct Trump’s tweets from scratch following his account was suspended temporarily suspended.
“The text is entirely unchanged,” the aide said to The Hill. “The final image was erroneously adorned with a the blue verification checkmark on it, however the content of it was 100% exact. What is Trump’s lawyers to say?”
The purpose is, obviously, not to present a compelling defense of Trump however, it was to attempt to undermine Democrats and give van der Veen and others an opportunity to entertain viewers with their witty comments on television shows. To that goal, the mission was completed.
