Trump’s lawyers misspell ‘United States’ in opening lines of impeachment response

The president has a track record of shoddy legal briefs in big cases

Former president Donald Trump’s new legal team got off to a shaky start in a legal brief on Tuesday, addressing their arguments to the “Unites States Senate” instead of the United States Senate, the body that will try Mr Trump on 9 February on allegations he incited the 6 January attack on the Capitol.

The typo comes right off the bat, with the document declaring it is for “The Honorable, the Members of the Unites States Senate,” five lines in.

The legal memo, which argues the president can’t be impeached after leaving office, was exercising his free speech rights criticising the election, and didn’t cause the riot, also contains, for the true grammarians out there, a missing apostrophe.

The mistakes come after the former president announced two new lead lawyers on Sunday, including David Schoen, who’d discussed representing Jeffrey Epstein before his death by suicide in 2019. The shake-ups followed the departure of five lawyers from Mr Trump’s impeachment team in recent days.

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They’re also reminiscent of the president and his allies’ chaotic legal effort to overturn the legitimate election results, where lawyers backing the president bungled basic composition somewhat regularly, once writing “DISTRCOICT” instead of “district,” and submitting another lawsuit with a promise it contained “plenty of perjury."

The more than 60 election suits, none of which were successful in changing the election results or discovering evidence of massive voter fraud, also contained numerous factual blunders, such as accidentally arguing malfunctioning voting machines boosted Donald Trump and referring to a non-existent county in Michigan.