Impeachment trial – live: Trump poured ‘kerosene on the flames’ as Pence family fled for lives, Democrats say

Donald Trump Jr retweeted a lawyer who argued that the video shared by impeachment prosecutors in Donald Trump's Senate trial was "deceptive."

"Listening to the impeachment trial. Amazing how deceptive the editing is from the very beginning," Will Chamberlain, a lawyer and co-publisher of Human Events, wrote. "Raskin's video includes President Trump saying 'we are going to walk down to the Capitol' while omitting his request for his supporters to 'peacefully make their voices heard.'"

Graig Graziosi reports.

We heard earlier from Bruce Castor that Trump’s defence team changed their strategy after the impressive presentation from the House impeachment managers.

While he didn’t make clear what that change was, there is now reporting that he and David Schoen swapped slots.

New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman reported a Trump adviser saying Castor was intentionally trying to reduce the emotion in the room after the case, which saw Jamie Raskin tear up while remembering the riot.

With Schoen coming out of the gate with a much higher energy and emotional level, that strategy may have been to reduce the temperature in the room by swapping the order of their speakers.

“This is an untenable combination that literally puts the institution of the presidency directly at risk,” says David Schoen.

“Under their unsupported constitutional theory, and tortured reading of the text, every civil officer who has served is at risk of impeachment if any given group elected to the House decides what was thought to be important service to the country, when they served, now deserves to be cancelled.”

“With this trial you will open up new and bigger wounds across the nation for a great many Americans see this process for exactly what it is, a chance by a group of partisan politicians seeking to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene,” he says to begin.

“This idea of a January amnesty is nonsense, if my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think that president Trump committed a criminal offence, and let's understand that a high crime is a felony and a misdemeanour is a misdemeanour,” says Bruce Castor.

“After he’s out of office you go and arrest him. So there is no opportunity where the president of the United States can run rampant in January at the end of his term and just go away scot-free. The Department of Justice knows what to do with such people. And so far I haven’t seen any activity in that direction.”

“I’ll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House manager’s presentation was well done,” says Bruce Castor.

“Let’s understand why we are really here, we are really here because the majority in the House of Representatives does not want to face Donald Trump as a political rival in the future,” Bruce Castor says.

“That’s why we’re really here. That’s why they need to get over the jurisdictional hurdle, which they can’t get over… in order to get to the part of the constitution that allows removal.”

Alan Dershowitz, who joined Donald Trump's legal team during the former president's first impeachment trial in 2020, told right-wing news network Newsmax that he has "no idea" why the former president's current counsel opened his remarks by praising US Senators during Mr Trump's second trial.

Bruce Castor said Democratic impeachment managers gave an "outstanding presentation" and called Senators acting as jurors in the trial "extraordinary people, in the technical sense."

"You will not hear any member of the team representing former President Trump say anything but in the strongest possible way denounce the violence of the rioters and those that breached the Capitol," he said.

"I have no idea what he is doing," Mr Dershowitz told the network moments after Bruce Castor's opening remarks. "That's not the kind of argument I would have made, I’ll tell you that."

Alex Woodward has more.

“This trial is about trading liberty for the security from the mob. Honestly, no. It can’t be. We can’t be thinking about that, we can’t possibly be suggesting that we punish people for political speech in this country,” lawyer Bruce Castor says.

“And if people go and commit lawless acts as a result of their beliefs and they cross the line, they should be locked up.”

“That’s what we broke away from Great Britain in order to be able to do, to be able to say what we thought in the most robust political debate,” says Bruce Castor.

“I don’t expect, and I don’t believe the former president expects, anybody, to walk back any of the language if that’s how they feel about the way things transpired over the last couple of years in this country they should be allowed to say that.”