Former President Donald Trumps legal defence team insisted in a legal brief filed on Tuesday that he shouldnt be convicted for impeachment in the Senate in part by continuing to push the same election fraud claims the former president spouted to supporters who went on to storm the Capitol on January 6.

Trumps lawyers submitted the brief to the Senate ahead of its impeachment trial, which is set to begin in earnest next week. Their chief argument is that because Trump is no longer president, the Senate cannot convict him. In fact, there is precedent for impeaching and trying officials after they leave office. (Less important: The legal brief misspells United States on its first page.)

But the legal brief also makes other, more dangerous arguments. It states that Trump denies that he made false statements when he claimed the election results which he lost resoundingly were fraudulent. It claims that states used the coronavirus pandemic as a convenient guise to expand voting by mail, in line with Trumps monthslong effort to cast mail-in ballots as suspect. And it states that Trump denies he made a false claim when he said we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.

The brief also denies that Trump intended to interfere with the counting of Electoral votes a laughably false claim, given that he pushed for his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject electors in the very speech where he told supporters to march on the US Capitol.

In fact, after those supporters overwhelmed Capitol Police barricades and broke into the Capitol, Trump tweeted his disappointment in Pence for refusing to break the law and reject the certified electors submitted by states that voted for President Joe Biden .

Mike Pence didnt have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. as Pence hid inside of the Capitol from rampaging Trump supporters. The tweet launched a round of chants of Hang Mike Pence! from insurrectionists inside the Capitol. One insurrectionist later said the crowd went crazy after they learned from Trumps tweet that Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the election.

Trumps legal brief also contains a lie claiming that when Trump told the crowd, if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore, he was only talking about the need to fight for election security in general.

The inflammatory statement that Trump supporters would not have a country anymore if they dont fight like hell was, in context, about Trumps lies about election fraud and not some general election security policy.

I think one of our great achievements will be election security, because nobody, until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were, Trump said. And again, most people would stand there at 9 oclock in the evening and say, I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life, but I said, Somethings wrong here. Somethings really wrong. Cant have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore.