On a bed of lies and rage, Trump's defense rests

[Zorro]

Opinion by Dana Milbank

If adjectives and adverbs were alibis, former president Donald Trump would be acquitted unanimously.

If hyperbole were exculpatory, he never would have been impeached in the first place.

But, alas, for the former president, his lawyers had little to work with — few facts, scant evidence and unhelpful precedents — to defend Trump against the well-documented case that he conceived, incited and encouraged the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The defense ran out of steam after consuming just 2 hours and 40 minutes of their allotted 16 hours.

Yet, even in that brief period, they misstated legal precedents. They invented facts. They rewrote history. Trump lawyer Bruce Castor, panned for his rambling opening argument Wednesday, closed the argument Friday by confusing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

But Michael van der Veen, the personal-injury lawyer Trump hired as part of his defense team for the Senate impeachment trial, did have one thing in abundance: words. The best words. Towering, hyperbolic words. Leading off Trump’s defense on Friday, he seemed to believe that if he piled up enough of them, the prosecution’s case would collapse under an avalanche of tangled, angry verbiage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/12/bed-lies-rage-trumps-defense-rests/

[badboy67]

1. Did anyone ever say "He didn't do it."

???