Democrats dismissed former President Trump’s defense team’s accusation that they “created false representations” with video and tweets during the Senate impeachment trial.
During opening arguments on Friday, one of Trump’s defense lawyers, David Schoen, alleged that House impeachment managers, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), had used tweets with irrelevant dates and verification and confused the term “cavalry” with “calvary” in one post.
One senior aide on the House impeachment team noted that Trump’s tweets are only available via the archive since his account was suspended indefinitely following the Capitol attack.
The aide said the content of the tweets displayed were accurate and the argument that the verification on one of the retweeted posts indicates false information is inaccurate.
“As Trump’s attorneys spotlighted, while inexplicably condemning the managers for a draft graphic of a tweet barely visible on a computer screen inside a New York Times photo that was not shown in the Senate, it is necessary to format and blow up the text of tweets into a graphic so that Senators can see it. The text is entirely unchanged,” the aide said.
“The final graphic accidentally had a blue verification checkmark on it, but the substance of it was entirely accurate. So what is Trump’s attorneys’ point? If anything, it is further evidence of President Trump’s attention to and knowledge of what was being openly planned on Jan. 6 by his followers, even those without Twitter verifications,” the aide continued.
“Furthermore, in self-evident context, it is simply not believable that President Trump recognized the frequently confused ‘calvary’ as anything besides the ‘cavalry is coming.’ “
The aide also pushed back against Trump’s lawyers’ allegation that the video the managers showed was strategically spliced to paint a false depiction of the former president’s remarks. The aide noted Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) showed video of the former president stating that protesters should “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The source argued that Schoen used video misrepresenting how the managers presented their case.
“Somewhere in between repeatedly showing video of comments from Democrats cut entirely out of their context, Trump’s attorney leveled a false accusation of selective editing at the House managers, and in doing so, selectively edited the managers’ presentation to make his point. Schoen’s statement is incorrect,” they said.