As Trump faces trial in the Senate on charges that he incited the Jan. 6 insurrection, a lawyer for the Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola, filed a memo in federal court in Washington on Wednesday making an argument Democrats have stressed repeatedly in the impeachment proceedings: that the riot was the culmination of weeks of conspiracies and misinformation spread by the president to overturn the election results.

When he stormed the Capitol, Pezzola was responding to “the entreaties of the then commander in chief, President Trump,” according to the filing by lawyer Jonathan Zucker. “Defendant did not act out of criminal intent but out of conscience, albeit a frighteningly confused and distorted sense of conscience.”