Government

Impeachment Is Off To A Roaring Start As Trump Switches Out Entire Legal Team

Auspicious beginning.

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(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

With the impeachment trial set to begin next week, former President Trump has decided that now is a great time to get new lawyers. They’ve got a whole eight days to draft a brief defending Trump’s perfect, perfect speech to the mob which stormed the U.S. Capitol. Should be plenty, right?

Good thing Trump’s lawyers could sing sea shanties for seven straight days and forty-five Republican senators would still vote to acquit.

CNN broke the news on Saturday night that all five of Trump’s lawyers had left his legal team. Reportedly the former president demanded that they argue the election was rigged and thus he was, uhhh, right to lean on the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him votes and incite a mob to attack congress.

Obviously, there are some holes in this argument. Not least of which is that all the evidence of fraud is bullshit which already got laughed out of court. The rational strategy would be to argue that impeaching a president who has left office is unconstitutional. Sure the Senate once impeached a former secretary of state, but at least the process argument takes the focus off Trump’s incendiary conduct leading up to the riot. Indeed forty-five senators have already signaled that they’re delighted to take this off-ramp, sparing themselves the discomfort of having to take a public stand on Trump’s bogus election fraud claims or the propriety of his conduct on January 6.

But rational isn’t really Trump’s bag, so he’s hoping to trot out all those nonsensical affidavits “proving” via “statistical analysis” that actually he won. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia all have multiple Democrats elected to statewide office, but it is somehow UNPOSSIBLE for these states to have voted for Joe Biden.

Just two weeks ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham lined up highly competent South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers as the “anchor tenant” or Trump’s legal team, but according to the New York Times, they never hit it off.

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The decision for Mr. Bowers to leave was “mutual,” another person familiar with the situation said, adding that Mr. Trump and Mr. Bowers had no chemistry, a quality the former president generally prizes in his relationships. Mr. Trump prefers lawyers who are eager to appear on television to say that he never did anything wrong; Mr. Bowers has been noticeably absent in the news media since his hiring was announced.

(Flashback to that time when Trump reprimanded Don McGahn because “Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”)

Last night the former president put out a press release announcing that Altanta-based attorney David Schoen and former Pennsylvania Solicitor General Bruce Castor, Jr. would be taking over his impeachment defense.

“It is an honor to represent the 45th President Donald J. Trump, and the United States Constitution,” said Schoen.

Castor added, “I consider it a privilege to represent the 45th President. The strength of our Constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history. It is strong and resilient, a document written for the ages. And it will triumph over partisanship, yet again, and always.”

Weird how Trump’s attorneys sound exactly like him.

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Castor, who served as Montgomery County District Attorney, is best known for his failure to charge Bill Cosby with sexual assault in 2005. The Republican ran unsuccessfully for multiple offices in Pennsylvania and is rumored to be contemplating a gubernatorial run in 2022. What better way to burnish his GOP bone fides than defending the party’s center of gravity on national television?

Schoen, who recently represented Trump’s pal Roger Stone on appeal, is an attorney more to Trump’s liking than the understated South Carolinians. The flamboyant attorney appears frequently on Fox, has represented Russian, Israeli, and Italian mobsters, and is not averse to a good conspiracy theory. Schoen was in talks to represent accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein before his death.

“I still think he was murdered,” Schoen told the Atlanta Jewish Times in September.

This is gonna be a circus.

Trump Names Two Members of Impeachment Defense Team [NYT]
Trump’s legal team exited after he insisted impeachment defense focus on false claims of election fraud [WaPo]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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