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Donald Trump attorney Michael van der Veen opened the ex-president’s formal impeachment defense on Friday by spraying 25 minutes of partisan acid rain on the Senate, dropping virtually every Trump-era conservative buzzword known to man.
An X’s-and-O’s masterpiece of whataboutism and intellectual dishonesty, Van der Veen’s presentation pelted Senators with classic conservative insults against Democratic politicians. For good measure, it also included outright falsehoods concerning both the makeup of the mob that attacked the US Capitol on January 6 and the nature of Trump’s speeches denouncing the 2020 election — both on the day of the insurrection and well before.
He falsely claimed, for instance, that the “first rioter” arrested by law enforcement in the wake of the Capitol riot was an “Antifa leader, not a Trump backer”. This was part of a broader (and factually preposterous) effort to mischaracterize the pro-Trump mob as consisting of “extremists of various different stripes and political persuasions.”
Not only has no alleged insurrectionist arrested so far been accused by authorities of having ties to Antifa, but nearly every defendant has cited support for Trump’s months-in-the-making “stop the steal” movement as their reason for storming the legislature.
To boot, Democratic lawmakers across the board (including Joe Biden) have denounced the far-left anarchist group Antifa — something Trump has refused to do when it comes to radical right-wing movements such as the “Proud Boys” and QAnon. Many of those who profess themselves sympathizers withthose two groups have been charged.
Van...