You're a very smart guy.
Why don't you believe conviction is CERTAIN if Trump uses an election fraud defense?
His lawyers' responses to the impeachment are concise, correct, and allow an appeal over the Bill of Attainder issue.
Unless you don't care if Trump is convicted, what possible good can come of allowing an election fraud defense?
Trump could, and should, make multiple defenses: that the trial is both moot and improper.
What's interesting about this line of argument is that the issue of election fraud is in the article of impeachment. A first response would be to say that it is improper to include a charge in the article of impeachment and then deny the President the right to put up a defense against the charge.
From the article of impeachment:
2 ...In the months preceding the Joint Ses
3 sion, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements
4 asserting that the Presidential election results were the
5 product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted
6 by the American people or certified by State or Federal
7 officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced,
8 President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in
9 Washington, DC. There, he reiterated false claims that
10 ‘‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide’’.
The predicate for Trump's alleged crime is that he repeatedly made "false statements" that said that the election was fraudulently won and that's how he "incited" the crowd at the rally.
A natural defense would be that the crowd didn't need "incitement" on this issue because there was plenty of public information already out there that the people were well aware of. He could then submit as evidence the information that the people had access to.
I would say that he doesn't necessarily want to spend the time trying to prove that the election was fraudulently won, but only that reporting of the evidence of election fraud presented at hearings held by several state legislatures was widely available to people who attended the rally, and therefore the President did not incite the crowd "with false statements."
These were statements made under oath at several state legislature hearings, the President should argue.
-PJ