AUSTIN, Texas — A viral moment from November 2020 involving a Joe Biden campaign bus and a caravan of Donald Trump supporters in Central Texas may play a key role in the former president's second impeachment trial.
A House trial memorandum mentions the moments when a caravan of Trump supporters in Central Texas allegedly ambushed a Biden campaign bus on Interstate 35 near San Marcos, Texas.
KVUE reported that on Oct. 30, according to the San Marcos Police Department, officers received a call from the Biden-Kamala Harris campaign bus as they were on I-35 to request a police escort through San Marcos. Three officers responded, but due to the amount of traffic from an unrelated crash, they weren't able to catch up to the bus before it left the San Marcos jurisdiction.
A Biden-Harris staffer later called the Kyle Police Department to report a vehicle incident on I-35 near exit 213, SMPD said.
At the time, President Trump responded to KVUE and Austin-American Statesman reporter Tony Plohetski's tweet about the investigation of the incident saying, "In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!"
Even though the Texas caravan incident happened nine weeks before the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, the U.S. House included the incident in their argument that Trump incited the violence that led to the riot in Washington, D.C.
“October 30, when a caravan of his supporters in Texas attacked a bus full of Biden campaign workers, nearly running it off the road, President Trump tweeted a stylized video of the caravan and captioned it, ‘I LOVE TEXAS!’ Days later, he declared that ‘these patriots’—who could easily have killed a busload of innocent campaign staff—’did nothing wrong,'” the House trial memorandum reads.
In January, former Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis, who was on the bus, told The Texas Tribune that "law enforcement authorities didn’t take that incident seriously enough" and "sees it is an example of how Trump supporters have become dangerously emboldened to act lawlessly, fueled by some Republicans who either tacitly or explicitly encouraged the sort of violence that culminated with last week’s attack."
“This is a symptom of a broader problem that is not going away. This truly is the birth of a domestic terrorist unit. And I think that the FBI and local law enforcement need to see it this way,” Davis told the Texas Tribune on Jan. 11. “It’s no surprise that we see things [the Jan. 6 attack] in our nation's Capitol, when people who are behaving aggressively like that are rewarded and praised by their quote-unquote leader for that kind of behavior.”
The Senate will move forward Wednesday with former President Trump's impeachment trial after voting 56-44 that the trial is in fact constitutional, even though Trump is no longer in office. In fact, the Senate has held impeachment trials for officials no longer in office before. Opening arguments are scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. Feb. 10.
The trial is expected to continue into the weekend.
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