Defense to argue Trump not tied to riot violence

Donald Trump's impeachment defense team is expected to acknowledge but dissociate the former president from the U.S. Capitol riot by arguing individuals carried out the violent acts, and Trump's rhetoric is protected under the 1st Amendment.

Trump attorney David Schoen said Thursday that the defense's case should go quickly on Friday, making clear they have no intention of using the 16 hours available to them.

Schoen described the House Impeachment managers presentation as offensive and that the prosecutors "haven't tied it in any way to Trump."

Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker said Trump's legal has to respond to Democrats' two-day visceral presentation outlining the violent attack at the US Capitol and directly linking calls to "stop the steal" to then-president Trump's tweets, and his speech during the Save America March rally on January 6th.

"The defense team, they are prepared to say nothing that the Democrats have said actually links the rhetoric from the president to the behaviour of the rioters," Tucker said. "You can talk about the people who smashed the windows, who looked for looked menacingly for Nancy Pelosi in the building, Donald Trump wasn't that person. And so you can say, but for Donald Trump's words, he wouldn't have been there. But that's different than saying Donald Trump is the chief inciter."

The former president's defense team insists Trump's speech near the White House was protected under the First Amendment. And they argue he shouldn't be on trial in the Senate because he is no longer in office — an argument Democrats reject.

Tucker expects the Trump defence to use one of his rally quotes where urges his supporters to "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" as they march down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill.

"They're also going to say that he has a First Amendment right, like any citizen, to not trust the election results, to tell his followers not to trust the election results, to engage, frankly, in political speech," Tucker said. "The difference here from the perspective of Democrats, though, is they say that this speech isn't political, it's incitement... And the notion that you could say that the Constitution protects a president's efforts to overturn an election and exhort his followers and loyalists to violently stampede inside of the seat of American democracy... strains credulity."

The first president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office, Trump is also the first to be twice impeached.

His lawyers say he cannot be convicted because he is already gone from the White House. Even though the Senate rejected that argument in Tuesday's vote to proceed to trial, the issue could resonate with Senate Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behaviour.

While six Republicans joined with Democrats to vote to proceed with the trial on Tuesday, the 56-44 vote was far from the two-thirds threshold of 67 votes needed for conviction.