Will Trump turn tables on Dems? Legal team to put Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters 'on trial'
It's highly unlikely that former President Donald Trump will be convicted during a Senate trial next week. Meanwhile, his legal team reportedly has plans to go after top Democrats directly as they present his defense. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump for a historic second time in January, charging him with "incitement of an insurrection." His trial is slated to begin on Monday, as Senators scrutinize whether the former President's comments about the election were responsible for the violence at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6. If convicted, Trump could be barred from running for public office in the future, Newsweek reported.
However, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the former president, has revealed that his legal team will argue on the Senate floor that Democrats are "trying to put freedom of speech on trial." "By doing that we're going to turn it around and make sure that [Senator] Chuck Schumer, [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, [Representative] Maxine Waters—all the radical crazies—on the Democratic side themselves are going to be on trial," Miller told Sebastian Gorka on his America First podcast.
Miller said that the anti-Trump rhetoric spewed by Democrats "all going to be on display" during the trial and it won't be the first time Republicans have held legislators accountable for their past comments, per Newsweek.
Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert took the opportunity during Trump's impeachment hearing in the House to bring attention to Pelosi's 2018 comment that those who supported the former president were "enemies of the state" and that she wondered why there weren't "uprisings all over the country" over claims that migrant children being separated from their families. "From our side, we didn't take those to be impeachable because we didn't believe she surely meant that, but by the Democrats taking this action, you're telling me, 'No when we say those things we mean to incite violence,'" Gohmert said, before voting against impeachment.
On January 26, Senator Rand Paul told his colleagues in the chamber that it was hypocritical to impeach Trump for allegedly inciting violence at the Capitol while glossing over "Democrat incitement to violence." Paul recalled a 2017 incident when a Bernie Sanders supporter had opened fire at top Republicans during a softball practice session, and also pointed to the time when Waters urged her supporters to harass Trump administration officials over his "zero tolerance" immigration policy.
"Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere. We've got to get the children connected to their parents," Waters said in 2018. Now, she has called for Trump to be charged with premeditated murder for lives lost on January 6.
Trump has strongly denied having anything to do with the violence that plagued the Capitol building. His attorneys argued in a pre-trial brief that comments made by their client were protected by the First Amendment. That said, chances are slim to nonexistent that Trump will be convicted next week, even with Democrats having control of the Senate. This is because it would require the support of at least 17 Republicans and nearly all of them have voted to dismiss the case altogether, according to Newsweek.