President Donald Trump may have become the first ever back-to-back impeachment champion in US history on Saturday, but according to mild-mannered, monotone attorney Michael van der Veen, it was no time for a victory lap.
In an interview with CBS News from within the Capitol rotunda, van der Veen unloaded on a smug and haughty Lana Zak after the daytime weekend anchor misrepresented the defense’s winning case.
The day prior, van der Veen and his associates had dropped the game-changing bombshell that House impeachment managers had deliberately altered several pieces of evidence.
Among these were the misrepresentation of one re-created tweet from former president Donald Trump to suggest that it was a screenshot, and the altering of a tweet to suggest it had come from a “verified” Twitter account.
Moreover, the Democrats doctored numerous video clips to paint a misleading picture of Trump’s role in “inciting” the violence by editing out his repeated calls for peace and unity.
And they repeated a frequently debunked leftist trope suggesting Trump had offered support to white supremacists following 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Va. (although the impeachment managers got the state wrong twice).
The Democrats also inflated the “death toll” from the Jan. 6 uprising to include several medical-related deaths that were ancillary to the violence and two subsequent police suicides, although no public evidence has linked them to the event at the Capitol.
They were later exposed for having promoted falsehoods about the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, whom the New York Times had deceptively claimed died of blunt-force trauma. But that misinformation was likely fed to the paper from Democrats themselves.
During their counter-presentations, van der Veen and fellow defense attorney David Schoen noted that because of the unprecedented haste the Democrats used in railroading through the impeachment process, Trump and his team had been thoroughly denied due process and were blocked from getting access to evidence in order to test its veracity.
They said the highly touted “never before seen” footage that left several mainstream media hacks “visibly shaken,” according to the echo chamber’s buzz-phrase du jour, was itself illustrative of this violation of Trump’s constitutional rights since the lack of an investigative phase meant his defense had never seen it either.
Nonetheless, the examples the defense lawyers cited were just a small cross section of the countless deceptions baked into the partisan kangaroo trial by Trump’s political adversaries in their effort to bar him from a 2024 rematch.
During his post-acquittal interview, van der Veen began in true laconic form. For two questions, he tried to guard his words in order to avoid letting the media spin the narrative and undermine the case itself.
In response, whether to fill the gap in airtime or to provoke van der Veen into elaborating, Zak took it upon herself to try to proffer her unique interpretation of the defense arguments.
When she misleadingly suggested that van der Veen had agreed there was an “insurrection,” he cut her off mid-question to clarify that his use of the word was simply drawing from the impeachment managers’ formal allegations.
“No, you didn’t understand the case, he said. “I used the word ‘insurrection’ in my closing argument when quoting the charging documents.”
Van der Veen then went on to expound upon the foundation of the defense case to clarify for Zak and her viewers wherein the problem lay.
“What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was absolutely horrific, but what happened at the Capitol at this trial was not too far away from that,” he said.
“The prosecutors in this case doctored evidence,” he continued. “They did not investigate this case, and when they had to come to the court of the Senate to put their case on, because they hadn’t done any investigation, they doctored evidence. It was absolutely shocking, I think, when we discovered it, and we were able to expose it and put it out. I think it turned a lot of senators.”
He went on to turn the tables on the House managers, suggesting that their conduct should come under equal scrutiny as Trump’s.
But Zak rushed to the Democrats’ defense, keying in on the allegations of doctored evidence while pretending that her false framing of the follow-up was for the benefit of viewers at home:
“Let’s follow up with a point that you’re making right now about the House managers, as you say, doctoring evidence,” she said. “… To be clear for our viewers, what you’re talking about now is a check mark, uh, that’s a verification on Twitter that, that did not exist on that particular tweet; uh, a 2020 that should have actually read 2021; um, and the selective editing, you say, uh, of the tapes…”
An incredulous van der Veen then began to interject, noting that the Democrats never denied doctoring the evidence and asking Zak whether it was OK for them to justify it if it was just a small amount of doctored evidence.
“That’s not enough for you?” he said, becoming visibly shaken by the audacity of her question.
“… It’s not OK to doctor a little bit of evidence,” he added.
Talking over him, Zak coyly protested that she was merely trying to contextualize van der Veen’s comments.
Cocking her head leftward, her mouth in a contorted smirk, she ignoring the derision dripping from her questions, which clearly sought to downplay the defense accusation, and pretended to be taken aback by van der Veen’s reaction.
“Respectfully, I have not said it is OK … I want to be clear for our viewers about what exactly you’re sayin—doctored evidence…”
But van der Veen was having none of it.
“The media has to start the right story in this country,” he said.
“The media is trying to divide this country. You are bloodthirsty for ratings, and as such you’re asking questions now that are already set up with a fact pattern,” he added. “I can’t believe you would ask me a question indicating that it’s all right just to doctor a little bit of evidence.”
Van der Veen continued his epic rant for roughly three minutes, shredding both the biased news media and the House Democrats.
“When they were caught, they didn’t say anything about it,” he said of the impeachment managers. “They didn’t even try to come up with an excuse about it. And that’s not the way our prosecutors or our government officials should be conducting themselves, and the media shouldn’t be letting them get away with it either.”
Van der Veen capped off the lecture with his personal appeal, as a private citizen, noting that he was not a media hound but an impartial observer of the self-feeding, incestuous news cycle that saw networks selling out a healthy, functioning democracy in favor of higher ratings.
“I’m tired of the biased media on both sides, left and right,” he said.
“What this country wants, what this country needs, is for this country to come together—to take the Left and the Right and find a middle ground and start responsibly being our public officials, our elected officials,” he continued. “And one of the reasons that they do it is because of the media—that the media wants to tell their narrative rather than just telling it like it is—and frankly I’m tired of it.”
Zak eventually tried to regain control of the interview and insist that it was a “fair” question, but van der Veen made clear that the discussion was finished, and soon after closed it with a literal mic drop.
