In light of the speed with which events have proceeded, it seems like a review of ancient history to discuss the Second Impeachment of former President Donald Trump. For those who do not remember, shortly after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, Democratic members of the House of Representatives voted an Article of Impeachment against Trump for one count of Incitement of Insurrection. Specifically, “by inciting violence against the Government of the United States…President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials.”
“On January 6, 2021,” the Article of Impeachment states, “pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials.”
The Article of Impeachment continued; “Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, DC (on January 6). There, he reiterated false claims that ‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.’ He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.”
Of course, this impeachment did not accurately summarize Trump’s comments on January 6. In fact, as we reported shortly after the events of that day, these are Trump’s actual words; “‘Our country has had enough. We will not take it any more and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal… Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you…We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women…You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.’
“These words occurred towards the beginning of his speech. Near the end, President Trump said ‘(W)e’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give…our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.'”
Besides the inaccurate and misleading use of Trump’s words, the Impeachment contained various other misstatements of fact. For instance, while law enforcement personnel were injured, none were killed on January 6. In fact, the only person killed that day was an unarmed protestor, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot to death by Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd. (An internal investigation cleared the officer of wrongdoing.)
Trump did call the 2020 election results into question, and did call on “Vice President Pence to reject Biden’s win and send the results back to the states… (h)owever, Pence said it is ‘my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.'”
The riot at the Capitol followed Trump’s speech, and VP Pence‘s refusal to agree to the former President’s wishes.
Predictably, this Impeachment ended in the same fashion as the first – with an acquittal of President Trump by the Senate – and that had NPR worried. “The verdict closes the book on this Trump presidency, though the Senate, by not convicting and barring him from holding public office in the future, left open the possibility that Trump, a 74-year-old Republican, could run again for president.”
Sure enough, just as NPR feared, Donald Trump announced his campaign to run for President of the United States in the 2024 election. “’In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,’ Trump told a crowd (in November of 2022) at Mar-a-Lago, his waterfront estate in Florida, where his campaign will be headquartered.”.
As we all know, in August of 2022, before Trump had even announced his candidacy, the FBI conducted a search of the former President’s home in South Florida in an effort to recover documents Trump was allegedly withholding from the National Archives. We have argued that this search was illegal, based upon an unconstitutionally overbroad search warrant. Then, subsequent to Trump’s announcement of his campaign, in the Spring of 2023, Trump was indicted by the New York County District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, for allegedly falsifying business records in an effort to conceal payments made from his 2016 campaign to porno actress Stormy Daniels.
Once that line had been crossed, and a former President of the United States was indicted for criminal charges, in June of 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith brought an indictment against Trump in a Florida Federal Court, alleging that the former President violated the Espionage Act by being in possession of classified documents, evidence which was obtained in the August 2022 search of Mar A Lago.
Not satisfied with his Florida indictment of Trump, Smith then used a Grand Jury in Washington DC to revisit the subject of the second Trump impeachment – the former President’s actions on January 6, 2023. The result? Yet another federal indictment of Donald J. Trump.
According to this indictment, filed with the DC District Court on August 1, 2023, “The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election…(d)espite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Judge John Wilson served on the bench in NYC
The Report concludes tomorrow
Illustration: Pixabay