The Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump on the charge of incitement to insurrection on Saturday, with the 57-43 vote falling short of the two-thirds majority required to convict and forever bar him from holding public office.
Patricia Bast Lyman, Republican National Committee committeewoman from the state of Virginia, has apologised to the US Jewish community after comparing Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial to Nazi show trials in a Facebook message
“I was saddened and disappointed to learn a comment I made on the current impeachment against President Trump in the US Senate on a post referencing Nazi war trials was interpreted as anti-Semitic and insensitive. I immediately contacted leaders in the Jewish community and I see now how the comment could be misinterpreted. I have therefore deleted it,” the official wrote on her Facebook page.
The apology follows Bast Lyman’s response to a Facebook post by Fairfax County Republican Committee Chairman Steve Knotts, who posted a photo from a trial in wartime Nazi Germany as Trump’s Senate impeachment trial unfolded. “At least some of those tried by the Nazis may have been actual criminals, unlike the current debacle,” she wrote.
The post and Bast Lyman’s comments, both of which have now been deleted, prompted some observers to accuse her of using “virulent anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi language” and to demand her resignation. Others suggested that the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel US-based NGO tasked with stopping “the defamation of the Jewish people,” to get involved.
The committeewoman’s supporters thanked her for the apology, calling her a “great friend and a fellow patriot” and suggesting the attacks against her were part of a “deliberate effort to mischaracterise” her.
Show Trials Backstory
Soon after coming to power in 1933, Nazi authorities began to stage show trials against forces deemed hostile to the regime. The trials, known as “People’s Courts,” were established after the trial of the alleged perpetrators of the Reichstag Fire, which saw the acquittal of the majority of the accused. Unlike the courts that preceded them, People’s Court trials lacked a presumption of innocence, and defendants were restricted from consulting legal counsel.
Bast Lyman’s inapt comparison of Trump’s Senate trial to other maligned processes from history is not the first of its kind. Last week, Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy accused House Democrats of carrying out a Soviet-style “show trial” against the former president.
Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate on Saturday, with Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans failing to reach the two-thirds majority required to convict him of inciting the 6 January storming of the Capitol.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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