Senate declares impeachment trial of Trump for Capitol assault lawful

The impeachment trial of former US President Donald Trump for his responsibility in the assault on the Capitol began on Tuesday with a sharp contrast between the strategies of the prosecution and the defence, and with a vote in which the Senate declared the process to be legitimate and constitutional.

More than a month after Trump urged his supporters to march on Congress and a mob of them stormed the Capitol, the Senate began the second impeachment trial against the former president, who left office three weeks ago.

"The charges against former President Trump are the most serious ever brought against a president in the history of the United States," said Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at the start of the session.

The fact that Trump is the first US president to face impeachment when he is no longer in office was the focus of the opening session of the impeachment trial, the second to be held in the Senate against the now ex-president.

Trump's lawyers argued that it was unconstitutional to try him politically when he is no longer in the White House, while Democratic "prosecutors" defended the process, recalling that it evaluated events that occurred when he was still president.

"We cannot create a 'January exception' in our precious Constitution, so that corrupt presidents have a few weeks to do whatever they want" at the end of their term without fear of prosecution, said the chief impeachment prosecutor, Democratic lawmaker Jamie Raskin.

The Senate agreed with him a few hours later, ruling that impeachment proceedings against a president who has already left office are constitutional, by a 56-44 vote.

All of those who voted against the issue were Republicans, Trump's party, most of whom have avoided holding the former president directly responsible for the assault on the Capitol, which left five dead.

However, six Republican senators joined the Democratic bench and voted in favour of declaring the process constitutional: Bill Cassidy, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey.

That first vote served as a thermometer of the mood in the Senate and underlined the high likelihood of the impeachment trial ending in acquittal, as convicting Trump would require 67 votes and Democrats only control 50 seats, so they would have to convince at least 17 Republicans.

Although the first day's debate was focused on constitutionality, Democratic lawmakers serving as impeachment "prosecutors" did not want to waste time, and began their argument with a screening of a 13-minute video of the assault on the Capitol and Trump's harangues to his supporters.

For many lawmakers, senators and journalists who experienced the assault in person on 6 January, it was not easy to relive it through that video, and the silence was palpable on the Senate floor when the images finished playing.

"The sounds of the mob just surrounded us again," said Emily Cochrane of The New York Times, who was present on Capitol Hill both on 6 January and at Wednesday's session.

It was a sign of the extraordinary nature of this impeachment trial, which revolves around events that the senators - who serve as jurors - experienced first-hand, unlike the first "impeachment" against Trump, which was about his pressures on Ukraine.

"There are people who died that day. Agents who have ended up with head injuries and brain damage (...). Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be America's future," "prosecutor" Raskin stressed in an emotional plea.

Flummoxed by what he described as an "outstanding" presentation by Democratic "prosecutors", Trump's lead impeachment lawyer, Bruce Castor, acknowledged that the defence had changed its strategy from what it had planned to lay out in the session.

Sources close to Trump leaked to the press that Castor's aim was to "lower the temperature" after Raskin's forceful speech, but what the lawyer did was a rambling ramble with no apparent direction, in which he mixed praise for the senators with strange and unconnected references.

Castor's name had become trending on Twitter by the time his colleague David Schoen took over and denounced the impeachment trial as an exercise in "crude and misguided partisanship".

"This trial will tear our country apart, perhaps as we have only seen once before in the history of the United States," Schoen warned, in an apparent reference to the country's civil war (1861-1865).

The impeachment trial will resume at 12:00 noon (17:00 GMT) on Wednesday, when the impeachment "prosecutors" will begin their substantive arguments, who have a maximum of 16 hours over two sessions to make their case, before the defence's turn comes.