US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One before departing Harlingen, Texas on January 12, 2021. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump’s lead impeachment defense attorney Bruce Castor said he will use video clips of top Democrats allegedly inciting violence during the forthcoming trial in the Senate.
Castor said the defense team will adhere to the strategy outlined in the brief they submitted to the Senate on Tuesday.
The Trump defense team argued in the brief that the Constitution “requires that a person actually hold office to be impeached” and that Trump was exercising his First Amendment right of free speech to question the results of the November election.
The impeachment against Trump goes against the Constitution because Trump doesn’t hold any office after he left the White House on Jan. 20, the lawyers argued.
Castor revealed that the defense team will use some video clips of top Democrats encouraging violence during the impeachment trial which is scheduled to start on Monday.
“I think you can count on that,” he told Fox’s Laura Ingraham. “If my eyes look a little red to the viewers, it’s because I have been looking at a lot of videos the last couple of days.”
Castor noticed that some Democrats nationwide cheered when the rioters were burning down the cities and attacked the federal law enforcement officers last summer in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd.
“Many of them [Democrats] in Washington using really the most inflammatory rhetoric as possible to use,” he said. “But here when you have the president of the United States give a speech and says ‘you should peacefully make your thinking known to the people in Congress,’ he all of a sudden the villain. So you better be careful what you wish for.”
During his Jan. 6 speech which later became the focus of the Democrats’ impeachment against him, Trump told his supporters: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
It’s unclear which Democrats’ remarks will the Trump team cite during the impeachment trial.
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said there should be “unrest in the streets.”
“Make the phone calls, send the emails, show up,” she said in an interview with MSNBC’s “AM Joy.” “There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives. And unfortunately, there’s plenty to go around.”