Impeachment trial: Stunning phone call Trump held with McCarthy during Capitol riot revealed

In its defence of the “incitement’ charge, Donald Trump’s legal team highlighted Kamala Harris asking supporters to bail out people arrested last summer, showing this tweet with a link to the Minnesota Freedom fund, with Michael Van der Veen saying one of the recipients of the bailout went on to commit an assault and “beat the bejesus out of somebody”.

A Reuters investigation found that 13 staffers from the Biden campaign donated to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which raised $30m following riots in the state last summer.

According to The Washington Post's “Fact Checker”, there are “some instances” of the MFF bailing out suspects of serious crimes.

Among them was the $75,000 in cash the fund paid to bail out Jaleel Stallings, who was charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting at police. The fund also paid $750 toward the bond for Chylen Evans, charged with looting a liquor store, clothing store and mobile store.

In early June, at the time of Harris’ tweet, the fund spent $250,000 on bail actions. In August, Minneapolis broadcaster KMSP reported the fund posted the $100,000 for a woman accused of murder, and $350,000 for a convicted rapist charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault.

Before the $30m cash injection, the average bail paid by the fund was $342, with the average after the increased fundraising increasing to $13,195, according to an investigation by KSMP.

One of the men bailed about by the fund in July, Lionel Timms, was charged weeks later with a third-degree assault that left a victim with a fractured skull and traumatic brain injury.

Following Timm’s arrest, the Minnesota Freedom Fund issued a statement saying they do not make their determinations of bail support based on alleged crimes.

“We are, however, taking steps to strengthen our internal procedures for ensuring that those we bail out receive support, especially if they are in need of housing or medical treatment,” the statement said.

Bruce Castor is back and is defending against the charge of “incitement to insurrection” because the rioters were not, technically speaking, successful at a coherent insurrection.

“Clearly there was no insurrection, insurrection is a term of art, it's defined in the law and involves taking over a country, a shadow government taking the TV stations over and having some plan on what you’re going to do when you finally take power. Clearly, this is not that,” he says.

“What our colleagues across the aisle mean is incitement to violence. To riot. So the word incitement is the critical case and the critical issue in the case.”

Bruce Castor cites the “Brandenburg test” of case law (Brandenburg v Ohio) used to determine when inflammatory speech is intended to advocate illegal action:

• Implicitly or explicitly encourage the use of violence or lawless action.
• The speaker must intend that his speech will result in the use of violence or lawless action.
• The imminent use of violence or lawless action must be the likely result of the speech

“Well, that argument is completely eviscerated by the fact that the violence was pre-planned, as confirmed by the FBI, the Department of Justice and even the House managers. Not the result of the speech at all,” Castor says.

After the first three days saw the Democrat impeachment managers used Donald Trump’s words against him, the defence team employed the same tactics to show the words they left out.

Either Joe Biden WAS joking, or TJ Ducklo had some compelling “ifs, ands or buts” to avoid the on-the-spot firing the president promised to restore the decency and dignity missing from the White House under Donald Trump.

“I’m not joking when I say this, if you’re ever working with me, and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot, on the spot, no if ands or buts. Everybody. Everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity. That’s been missing in a big way in the last four years,” Biden said.

Danielle Zoellner has more on the White House defending its failure to keep Biden’s promise.

The trial has adjourned for a recess.

Unlike the first impeachment, which revolved around clandestine conversations and backroom machinations in Ukraine, Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has turned into a war of competing videos.

On Friday, the former president’s lawyer David Schoen showed a supercut of liberals seeming to endorse or minimize the occasional violence that attended police brutality protests over the summer, which included clips of elected Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and media figures like MSNBC’s Ali Velshi. Mr Schoen argued these comments “set a dangerous double standard” and invalidated the impeachment.

“We need to show you some of their own words,” Mr Schoen, who previously complained of Democrats’ own video montage, said before launching his.

The Independent’s Josh Marcus has the reaction.

In a preview of Donald Trump’s defence of his call to Georgia’s secretary of state, his legal team told today’s impeachment hearing that the ex-president’s demands to “find” more votes were taken “out of context”.

The Fulton County has launched a criminal investigation into a phone call Brad Raffensperger after the election, which Democrat impeachment managers used in its evidence of incitement to insurrection.

Defence attorney Bruce Castor says it’s an “obvious fact” the call couldn’t be used as evidence intended to incite a riot because he had nothing to do with the private call being secretly recorded or publicly released.

Castor also defended Trump asking to “find” more than 11,000 votes as being spedifically related to the drop in Georgia’s ballot rejection rates in 2020 compared to 2016.

“The word find, like so many others the House managers highlighted, is taken completely out of context. And the word find did not come out of thin air,” Castor says.

“Based on an analysis of publicly available voter data that the ballot rejection rate in Georgia in 2016 was approximately 6.42 per cent, and even though a tremendous amount of new first-time mail-in ballots were included in the 2020 count, the Georgia rejection rate in 2020 was a mere 4/10ths of 1 per cent. A drop off from 6.42 per cent to 0.4 per cent.”

The Senate has now begun the Q&A portion of the impeachment trial.

"I think the president's lawyers blew the House Manager case out of the water,” he sais.

“They legally eviscerated them, I think their arguments when they showed the distortions of the tweets, the selective editing, showed the reason why due process is important. And they certainly proved the First Amendment applies to political speech probably more than anything.”