The first day of the Senate trial has baked into partisan lines and featured little movement with multiple party-line votes at 53-47. This was designed by Democrats to stave off the possibility of a quick acquittal vote without witnesses or documents to subpoena. The GOP intention is to only allow enough time to acquit Trump before the SOTU.
If the party-line votes continue, eventually the entire GOP will wear the media frame of cover-up in the 2020 election.
Daniel Dale updates the Trump lies, some of which were repeated by Trump’s counsel in the Senate trial.
Our original list from mid-November included 45 false claims he has made and a brief fact check of each one.
The impeachment process
27. Republicans were not allowed into the closed-door impeachment inquiry hearings. (Republican members of the three committees holding the hearings were
allowed into the room and to ask questions of witnesses. Only Republicans who were not on the committees were barred from the room.)
28. Republicans were not allowed to ask questions in the closed-door hearings. (Republicans were allowed to ask questions. Democrats and Republicans alternated questioning.)
29. Republicans were not allowed to ask questions in the public hearing held by the House Intelligence Committee on November 15. (Republicans were allowed to ask questions. Schiff would not grant a request from the committee's top Republican, Rep. Devin Nunes, to hand some of Nunes' questioning time to Rep. Elise Stefanik, because only Nunes was allowed to speak at that point in the hearing, but Stefanik
got to ask questions later in the day.)
30. Republicans were not allowed to have lawyers participate in the public hearings chaired by Schiff. (They were.
Lawyer Steve Castor questioned witnesses on behalf of the Republicans on the committee. It was Trump himself who was not allowed to have a lawyer participate.)
31. Nobody else has ever faced closed-door impeachment hearings. (
Both the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton impeachment processes involved some closed-door hearings.)
32. Trump's opponents have committed "illegal acts" related to impeachment. (Trump wasn't clear about who he was talking about, but there is no evidence of illegality by either the whistleblower or Democrats.)
34. Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union, maintained there was "no quid pro quo." (Sondland revised his original testimony. While he continued to say that Trump told him there was no quid pro quo, he
said his own belief was that there was a quid pro quo.)
36. "Many" of the people who had testified as of October 21 "were put there during Obama, during Clinton, during the Never Trump or Bush era." (FactCheck.org
noted that just two of the nine people who had testified at that point had been appointed under Obama. The other seven were appointed by Trump or his appointees.)
38. Trump was "deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process" during the House impeachment process, "including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses." (The rights of criminal defendants do not apply to public officials in a House of Representatives impeachment process.)
39. "More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials." (This is absurd. Nineteen innocent people were
hanged after they were accused of witchcraft in the trials of the late 1600s. The courts accepted "spectral evidence" from dreams. Some of the accused were
tortured into confessions.)
40. Trump "won 196 to nothing" in the House. (Trump did not win any vote related to impeachment. He lost an October vote to set the rules of the impeachment inquiry,
232-196, then the December votes on the two articles of impeachment,
230-197 and 229-198. He appeared to mean that there were no Republican defections from his side, but he didn't explain here.)
41. Democrats are "not doing anything" on gun violence because "all they do is the impeachment nonsense." (The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill in February to require background checks on all gun sales. The Republican-controlled Senate has
refused to hold a vote on the bill.)
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