Trump news: Impeachment defence lawyer says ‘idiotic’ to mention election as Gaetz offers to join case

Does Lindsey Graham want witnesses or not in the impeachment trial?

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, DC.

Good morning and welcome to The Independent’s coverage of the second impeachment of former US president Donald Trump.

The Democratic House impeachment managers have laid out their case against Donald Trump in a comprehensive memorandum accusing him of inciting the bloody insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January that left five people dead.

The 80-page document provides a roadmap for their prosecution of the former president when his Senate impeachment trial kicks off on 9 February. “If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a Joint Session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offence, it is hard to imagine what would be,” they argue.

Here’s Griffin Connolly’s essential guide to the 13 key takeaways from the memo.

Trump’s lawyers issued their own 14-page response, insisting that the trial is “unconstitutional” because their client is now a private citizen and was within his First Amendment rights when he aired his doubts about last November’s election result, which saw him lose by a landslide to Joe Biden and fail to find any evidence whatsoever to support his complaints.

Graeme Massie has this report.

More than 370 Democratic congressional aides have issued a public appeal to senators calling on them to convict the former president for inciting a violent “attack on our workplace”.

In a highly personal letter, staff describe hiding under their desks and barricading themselves inside offices as the rioters attempted to lay siege to the Capitol in a desperate overturn the election result inspired by Trump’s rhetoric.

“As congressional employees, we don’t have a vote on whether to convict Donald J Trump for his role in inciting the violent attack at the Capitol, but our senators do,” they wrote. “And for our sake, and the sake of the country, we ask that they vote to convict the former president and bar him from ever holding office again.”

The New York congressman, who was an impeachment manager last time around over the Ukraine affair, was interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night and took aim at South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham over his opposition to the trial, accusing him of being “divorced from reality” and reminding him that “there’s a new sheriff in town” (alluding to Chuck Schumer, majority leader since the Georgia runoffs).

“We have a client in the former president, the twice impeached president, and the disgraced president who is directing his legal team to do his bidding and carry out this narrative fantasy of the presidency being stolen. The big lie continues to be perpetrated by Donald Trump,” Jeffries added.

Here’s Shweta Sharma on Graham’s whiny opposition to witnesses being called.

The MSNBC anchor last night rubbished the Trump legal team’s typo-riddled rebuttal in a spirit of amused disbelief.

Here’s my report on Trump lawyer David Schoen’s preposterous argument on Sean Hannity’s Fox show on Monday night that the attempted insurrection had “nothing” to do with his client, despite many of the participants having marched directly from his speech to the Capitol while bedecked in Trump merchandise and bearing Trump flags.

Here’s Andrew Buncombe on why the lack of Republican support for conviction in the Senate means it doesn’t matter how "wild and scattershot" his defence team’s arguments are - they still have the votes to win.

You would have assumed they’d have checked their spelling given that they’re representing a former commander-in-chief but apparently not.

Here’s Josh Marcus on a typo unlikely to inspire confidence.

Graeme Massie has this report on David Schoen and Bruce Castor’s First Amendment argument for the defence.