After members of his first legal team quit, former President Donald Trump has acquired a pair of new lawyers to represent him in his looming second impeachment trial.
Two trial lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor Jr., will head the legal team defending Trump in the Senate against the charge that he incited the deadly invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
The hiring of Schoen, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer who previously represented Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone, and Castor, a former district attorney known for declining to prosecute Bill Cosby on sexual assault charges, was announced Sunday in a press release from Trump’s office.
The current team was installed after multiple outlets reported that Trump’s previous impeachment lawyers departed after the 45th president asked them to focus his defense on unfounded election fraud claims.
Trump, who lost to President Joe Biden in the November contest, spent weeks falsely asserting the race had been stolen from him through widespread fraud. He repeated those claims and called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election during a rally outside the White House just before a group of his supporters stormed the Capitol.
A source told NBC News that the lawyers‘ departure from Trump’s legal team was a „mutual decision.“ The New York Times, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that one of the since-departed lawyers, Butch Bowers, had no chemistry with Trump.
The impeachment trial is set to begin Feb. 9, nearly three weeks after Trump left the White House to make way for Biden. Last week, 45 Republican senators voted in support of a motion declaring it unconstitutional to hold a trial to convict a president who has left office — a view embraced by Trump’s new legal team.
„Schoen has already been working with the 45th President and other advisors to prepare for the upcoming trial, and both Schoen and Castor agree that this impeachment is unconstitutional,“ Trump’s office said in a statement.
The process-focused argument is seen by some as a potential escape route for Republicans who have refused to defend Trump’s conduct ahead of the Capitol riot but are reluctant to publicly cross their former party leader, let alone vote to convict him in an impeachment trial.
Democrats reject that argument. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., vowed that if Trump is convicted, there will be another vote to ban him from running for president ever again. But if the 45 GOP senators who voted to dismiss the trial ultimately move to acquit Trump, Democrats will fall far short of the 67 votes required to convict.
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