Trump lawyers misspelled ‘United States’ in his impeachment defence brief
- Trump lawyers spell ‘Unites States’ instead of ‘United States’ in defence brief for Senate trial
- Lawyers were hired just days ago after Trump’s original impeachment team quit
Former US president Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers misspelled the name of the country they were, filing a document that addressed “Members of the Unites States Senate”.
The typo was at the top of a 14-page brief filed ahead of Trump’s impeachment trial in the United States Senate. It argued that impeaching a former president would be unconstitutional, even though the Senate has previously impeached several public officials who left office.
Trump – who when he had a Twitter account frequently made bizarre spelling errors and had erratic capitalisation and punctuation errors – has been disdainful of typographical errors.
According to an Axios report, he said it was “very embarrassing” that Sidney Powell, the conspiratorial lawyer who falsely alleged conspiracy theories to explain Trump’s 2020 election loss, spelt “district” as “districct” and “distrcoict” in a lawsuit challenging the election results.
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“That was very embarrassing. That shouldn’t have happened,” Trump said, according to Axios.
The lawyers who filed the brief on Trump’s behalf, David Schoen and Bruce Castor Jnr, had only a short time to put together the document. Their hires were announced Saturday, shortly after everyone else on Trump’s team quit.
Schoen and Castor argued in the brief that the Senate “lacks jurisdiction to remove from office a man who does not hold office,” even though there is ample precedent for it doing exactly that. They also argued that Trump’s conspiracy theories claiming that the 2020 election was rigged, which led to an insurrection and riot at the Capitol building that left five people dead, was not an impeachable offence.
The House of Representatives charged Trump in January with inciting an insurrection. On Tuesday, its impeachment managers filed their own brief, arguing against the notion that any president could get a free pass from Congress in the waning days of their presidency.
“There is no ‘January Exception’ to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution,” the impeachment managers’ brief said. “A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last.”
