During their arguments Friday afternoon a Trump attorney claimed Democrats did not share with the defense team never-before seen security camera footage from the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
That’s a lie, according to multiple reports.
Here’s national political reporter Hugo Lowell:
“On Wednesday of this week countless news outlets repeated the Democrat talking points about the power of never before seen footage,” Schoen said in his opening remarks, per a C-Span transcript. “Let me ask you this: Why was this footage never seen before?” Schoen asked, angrily.
“Shouldn’t the subject of an impeachment trial, this impeachment trial, President Trump have the right to see the so-called new evidence against him? More importantly, the riot and the attack on the storied building was a major event that shocked and impacted all Americans. Shouldn’t the American people have seen this footage as soon as it was available? For what possible reason that the House managers withheld it from the American people and President Trump’s lawyers? For political gain.”
On MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace also reports, citing her source, Schoen lied and Democrats did hand over the evidence, before the trial, as the rules require.
“I have some new reporting though from a source familiar with the impeachment managers’ preparation and their communications with Donald Trump’s defense team,” Wallace told viewers.
“They tell me this, ‘every piece of evidence including new videos,’ he’s talking about the security videos, ‘were given to the defense team before the trial. They could have played them. He lied,'” she reports. “He turns out to be Mr Schoen, ‘when he said they never saw them. That was part of the rules we voted on, that they had to have those, they could have played them on Tuesday. Mr Schoen started by saying that we withheld these videos to shock the jury, and to illustrate that there’s no proof of due process that the trial rules required us giving them the videos before we started and we did that, when you don’t have a case. That’s what you do.'”
Watch: