Washington | US President Joe Biden said Thursday that Donald Trump’s Senate trial may have changed opinions about his predecessor, the day after a relentless account of the assault on Capitol Hill, punctuated by shocking videos and quotes chosen.
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Reflecting the strength of their presentation, Joe Biden, who had hitherto remained behind, made a first comment, cautious, on the trial of the Republican billionaire: “I think that some may have changed d ‘notice,’ he told reporters.
Even if he was right, it remains unlikely that Democratic prosecutors will manage to convince two-thirds of senators, the threshold necessary to find the former president guilty of “incitement to insurgency.”
Despite everything, they will resume their argument at noon in the very hemicycle where hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump had engulfed themselves violently, on January 6, when the elected officials certified the victory of Joe Biden in the presidential election.
Police officers screaming in pain, terrified elected officials, threatening assailants: mixing snippets from a surveillance camera, sometimes unpublished, with videos posted by the rioters, the prosecution reminded the hundred senators on Wednesday, both judges and jurors and witnesses, that they themselves had narrowly escaped “the worst”.
The elected Democrats of the House of Representatives, responsible for bringing the accusation, also placed the assault in the context of the post-election crusade of the Republican billionaire.
“President Trump was not an innocent witness to an accident,” as his lawyers suggest, but he “gave up his role as commander-in-chief to become the chief instigator of a dangerous insurgency, ”said Jamie Raskin, who oversees the team of prosecutors.
“The big lie”
Based in Florida, the former real estate mogul declined to testify. But his voice has continued to resound in the hemicycle of the upper house of Congress, where his accusers have projected many extracts from his speeches, reproduced his inflammatory tweets, cited his most controversial words.
“The big lie”: this is how they described the long campaign of disinformation on the election maintained by the 45th American president who repeated for weeks, without proof, that he had been the victim of massive electoral fraud .
After the failure of his legal complaints and his multiple pressures on electoral officials in key states, “President Trump found himself running out of nonviolent options to stay in power,” said the President. elected Ted Lieu.
He then turned to “groups that he cultivated for months”, such as the far-right Proud Boys, several of whose members were among the attackers on the Capitol, added his colleague Stacey Plaskett, recalling that the president called on them in October to “be ready”.
And on January 6, he launched to his supporters gathered in Washington, just before the intrusion into the temple of American democracy: “Fight like devils”.
“Target in the back”
To say that the ex-president could be responsible for a “small group of criminals” who “absolutely misunderstood” is “simply absurd”, had insisted his lawyers in writing on Monday, stressing that he had them “Urged to remain peaceful”.
“We checked the 11,000 words of his speech, the president only used the term” peaceful “once, against more than 20 + to fight +”, retorted Wednesday the elected Madeleine Dean.
Worse, according to Plaskett, he vindicated his own Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to stop the certification of the election result, or the leader of the Democrats in the House, Nancy Pelosi. He “put a target on their back,” she said.
Their narrative was praised by Republican Senator John Thune. “They did a good job of highlighting the links … to go back in time,” he told reporters.
It was “aggressive and absurd”, however commented his colleague Lindsey Graham, convinced that the vote + not guilty + would come out reinforced.
Donald Trump remains very popular in part of the electorate and still exerts a strong influence on the Republican Party.
If some senators from the “Grand Old Party” have blamed him for the attack, it seems unlikely that 17 will join the Democrats in declaring him guilty, and ultimately rendering him ineligible.