Former President Donald Trump's lawyers thought it was a good idea to show the whole video of his infamous "both sides" comment.
As they aimed to prove Trump incited the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, House impeachment managers showed Senate jurors his repeated use of the word "fight" in his speech before the attack, as well as examples from his long history of using violent rhetoric. But as Trump lawyer David Schoen argued Friday, those videos of Trump only looked bad because they were taken out of context. That included the time Trump said there was "blame on both sides" of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed.
After repeating some of Trump's videos in full, Schoen did exactly what he'd criticized the impeachment managers for and showed a 10-minute compilation of hundreds of times Democrats had also used the word "fight," with no context surrounding each instance.
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Schoen clarified that the Democrats in the video — many of whom are jurors in the impeachment — didn't do anything wrong. They were simply no different than Trump, he argued. Trump's other lawyer Michael van der Veen then took the floor, and showed some of the exact same clips of Democrats once again.
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