Trump impeachment manager on indictment: 'Damning, damning, damning'

WASHINGTON – While some lawmakers on Capitol Hill thought former president Donald Trump would never face the justice system over the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) tells Raw Story she never doubted the day would come.

She’s also struck by the historical importance.

“This is so not normal. We talk about it as if, ‘OK, here’s another indictment.’ This is so not normal,” she said.

The lawyer and law professor by trade served as an impeachment manager in Trump’s second Senate trial in 2021, and she attended most every public session of the House January 6 select committee. She knows the evidence against the former president, but she said she’s wowed by how well special counsel Jack Smith expertly crafted his legal argument in the45-page indictment.

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“It’s clearly so damning and clear and unconfusing but very conclusive,” Dean says. “Damning, damning, damning, great indictment.”

Dean says this latest indictment is — stylistically — different fromthe Mar-a-Lago classified document indictment, which she describes as “much more narrative. It reads like a screenplay, but this one is slightly denser but it’s literary, lyrical, using those verbs, saying things like ‘known and unknown’ to the grand jury,” Dean says. “But then to say was such concreteness ‘to defraud the United States using dishonesty, fraud, deceit’ — the incredible string of verbs. It’s very inclusive to use all of these different verbs.”

The legal document also has personal meaning to Dean, who was one of the members left trapped in the House gallery for hours on Jan. 6, 2021.

“And then to say that the defendant enlisted co-conspirators. That's what we saw. We knew that's what was going on, and he enlisted the last clown car of six co-conspirators and others ‘known and unknown’ to the grand jury to just defraud the United States,” Dean says.

The news of the indictment was “stunning, shocking and staggering,” Dean says, adding, it’s “sad.”

But she says she’s also is filled with optimism seeing the judicial system work and some Republicans put the Constitution above their loyalty to the former president.

“It's just a crazy paradox. As sad as I am that we were at this depth, I'm heartened that there are Republicans out there in very high places who get that this was crimes against the Constitution, crimes against America,” Dean says. “I’m actually buoyed up slightly, because look at who's talking in this indictment? It's Republicans who only wanted the best for Donald Trump. They wanted him reelected. They worked for his reelection.”

You wouldn’t know that from talking to some GOP presidential contenders or congressional Republicans, though.

In the House, Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are pushing two resolutions to expunge Trump’s two separate impeachments. Dean says no one can rewrite the history of that terrible day, and she dismisses their expungement resolutions for attempting to do just that.

“That's insane. ‘As if it had never passed the House,’ so please tell me, what does that mean forMr. and Mrs. Sicknick? Does it mean this grotesque violence and death and injury never happened?” Dean says, referring to a U.S. Capitol police officer who sustained injuries during the January 6 attack and died the next day from a stroke. “Are you kidding me?”

The violence was real, as Dean and all who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, know all too well.

Dean’s mind always drifts back to the attack on the Capitol itself, “I constantly remember the custodians who came in after and cleaned up the glass and the blood.”