últimas notícias

“As a result, asking whether President Trump was engaged in lawful First Amendment activity misses the point entirely,” they write. “Regardless of whether President Trump’s conduct on and around January 6 was lawful, he may be constitutionally convicted in an impeachment trial if the Senate determines that his behavior was a sufficiently egregious violation of his oath of office to constitute a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ under the Constitution.”

What is more, they argued, even if the First Amendment did apply to an impeachment trial, it would do nothing to bar conviction, which has to do with whether Mr. Trump violated his oath, not whether he should be allowed to say what he said.

“No reasonable scholar or jurist could conclude that President Trump had a First Amendment right to incite a violent attack on the seat of the legislative branch, or then to sit back and watch on television as Congress was terrorized and the Capitol sacked,” they wrote.

Finally, they contended that there is an “extraordinarily strong argument” that the defense would even fail in a criminal trial, because the evidence against Mr. Trump is most likely strong enough to meet the Supreme Court’s high bar for punishing someone for inciting others to engage in unlawful conduct.

Many of the signatories to Friday’s letter had signed onto a previous one pushing back on another key argument in Mr. Trump’s defense: the assertion that the Senate does not have jurisdiction to try a former president because the Constitution does not explicitly grant it that power.