Donald Trump has hired two new attorneys to take over his impeachment defense after five others quit over the weekend.
The latest team includes David Schoen, a Georgia lawyer who represented Trump’s confidant Roger Stone; in December Stone received a presidential pardon after he was convicted of lying, obstruction and witness tampering during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The other is Bruce Castor, a Pennsylvania attorney whose best-known legal decision was his refusal to prosecute disgraced comedian and actor Bill Cosby while Castor was a county district attorney in 2005.
Schoen is a colorful figure in the legal world, having defended “a wide range of clients, from mobsters to political figures,” reports Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times. Schoen also met with and considered representing convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein shortly before Epstein’s death in jail, which was ruled a suicide.
Schoen is also a frequent contributor to Fox News, discussing “high-profile criminal defense work,” the Times’s Haberman says.
“I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world,” Schoen told the Atlanta Jewish Times in a September interview.
In a Sunday statement about the appointments, Trump’s office referred to him as “the 45th president” rather than “former president,” reflecting his continued refusal to concede the 2020 election, claiming Joe Biden’s proven victory was a fraud.
Castor and Schoen have virtually no time to prepare to represent Trump, since the ex-president must file a response to the House impeachment charge on Tuesday, with the Senate trial due to begin next week.
In contrast, reports the Washington Post, House Democrats “have been working around-the-clock in preparation for the trial — including on Saturday night, when the news broke of Trump’s legal team collapsing, according to people familiar with their activities.”
The impeachment managers are compiling footage from Jan. 6, when Trump is accused of inciting the rally-turned-riot that invaded and trashed much of the U.S. Capitol.
Trump is likely to be acquitted by the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority vote to convict; all but five of 50 Republican senators voted last week to declare the ex-president’s second impeachment trial unconstitutional.
Schoen called it “an honor” to represent Trump “and the United States Constitution” in a press release, reports The Hill. Castor “similarly labeled his joining the team ‘a privilege.’”
“The strength of our Constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history,” Castor said. “It is strong and resilient. A document written for the ages, and it will triumph over partisanship yet again, and always.”
Trump is not required to appear personally at the Senate impeachment trial, and he almost certainly won’t, remaining instead at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida where he has been since departing Washington on Jan. 20.
The five South Carolina lawyers who parted ways with Trump over the weekend are said to have done so because “Trump wanted them to make the case during the trial that he actually won the election,” the Post says.
That would mean going along with his false claims of election fraud — a strategy wildly different from that supported by multiple Trump advisers who say the defense should focus on the argument that impeaching a president who has already left office is unconstitutional.
The lead lawyer in the South Carolina group, Karl “Butch” Bowers, told Trump he couldn’t successfully mount that kind of defense, says the Post, citing an unnamed source familiar with internal discussions of the case.