Trump impeachment trial live updates: Defense team begins ...

He repeated Trump’s false and baseless claims that there was fraud, and seemingly attempting to justify his phone call as entirely proper.Democrats, meanwhile, have cited the call as proof that Trump tried to overturn the election, not as proof of incitement.In another instance, Castor suggested that the rejection rate for absentee ballots in Georgia should have been higher, as it had been in the past; he did not acknowledge that the state standardized their process and trained election workers in proper signature-matching techniques before the election.There is no evidence of widespread fraud in Georgia, despite numerous investigations and inquires by state officials.Allan SmithThe president's legal team fumbled a number of words and other aspects of their presentations on Friday.Van der Veen at one point confused "resurrection" with "insurrection," called Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., "Anya," and mispronounced Vice President Kamala Harris' name. Trump's attorneys also took Democrats' comments out of context when playing video clips during the trial, the aide said."Somewhere in between repeatedly showing video of comments from Democrats cut entirely out of their context, Trump’s attorney leveled a false accusation of selective editing at the House managers, and in doing so, selectively edited the managers’ presentation to make his point," the aide said.Attorney David Schoen, for example, claimed that the Democratic managers played a clip from Trump's Jan. 6 speech in which he told the crowd they would "walk down" to the Capitol, alleging Democrats cut off the president's comments about going "peacefully and patriotically" to make their voices heard and cheer on some members of Congress.