Donald Trump has named new lawyers to lead the defence at his impeachment trial in the Senate next week on the charge that he unleashed a deadly insurrection upon the US Capitol on January 6, 2021
Coming just a day after the previous team fell apart, the former US President announced on Sunday evening that trial lawyers David Schoen and Bruce L Castor will now take over as his new legal team.
Reports said the former legal team, led by the South Carolina attorney, Butch Bowers had clashed with Trump over strategy.
However, the new lawyers are not without controversy. David Schoen represented Roger Stone, who was convicted in November 2019 of obstructing a congressional investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, and then had his prison sentence commuted by Trump.
The Atlanta-based lawyer also met with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when the financier was preparing for trial in New York on charges relating to sexual exploitation and shortly before Epstein died in jail in 2019.
Bruce Castor is a former acting attorney general of Pennsylvania and a prominent Republican who has been slammed by advocates for victims of sexual crimes because of his stance against reforms involving help for past victims of Catholic priests and in the case of university football coach and predator Jerry Sandusky.
And Castor gained notoriety for declining to prosecute Bill Cosby more than a decade before the entertainer was eventually convicted in 2018, and also sued Cosby’s victim, Andrea Constand, in a case that was dismissed, and then was sued by Constand for defamation, which was settled.
For now, it remained to be seen if Trump’s new team will have enough time to prepare for the impeachment trial.
The ability of Republican senators, who plan to acquit Donald Trump at his upcoming impeachment trial, has been endangered by the reported mass resignation of the former President’s legal team at the weekend.
Republican senators had insisted the position to defend Trump comes from their weighing the case brought against him on its merits
The United States Senate has set a deadline of Tuesday for Trump’s lawyers to submit a preliminary memo laying out his defence.
This follows the House impeachment of Trump earlier this month on a single article that read; “incitement of insurrection”, a historic second impeachment of a US president.
According to a schedule hammered out by leaders from both parties, House prosecutors were to respond to Trump’s defence memo, after which arguments would officially begin on the Senate floor on February 9, 2021.
However, the trial schedule, and its substance, were thrown into doubt with the departure of five lawyers on Trump’s defence team – apparently the entire team. The resignations were first reported by CNN, which said the lawyers and Trump disagreed over strategy.
In a sense the resignation of Trump’s lawyers seemed irrelevant, because Republicans are planning to acquit Trump in any case, observed Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer.
“The ‘crisis’ over Trump’s legal team quitting assumes that the substance of the impeachment case will sway Senate Republicans,” Zelizer tweeted.
“Most already have their answer. Trump could offer no defence or he can go on the floor to read lines from the Joker movie – they would still vote to acquit.”
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday morning, Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, who announced last week that he will not seek re-election, indicated that any notion of Donald Trump basing his defence in his second impeachment trial on a claim that he actually won the November election, rather than a constitutionality argument, “will not benefit” him.
Portman noted that there was not adequate evidence of fraud to change the election result from a victory for Biden and that was “the view of the Trump Department of Justice”, too.
“We need to be very clear to the American people, we have to acknowledge that this election was lost and we have to move on,” Portman said. “Joe Biden was duly elected.”
Trump’s former legal team, which had been led by the South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers, appeared to be crafting a defence that would have challenged the constitutionality of trying a president after he has left office. The team was also expected to argue that Trump’s speech was covered by the first amendment on free speech and did not constitute “incitement.”
In a vote last week, 45 out of 50 Republican senators backed a resolution supporting the argument that it would be unconstitutional to try a former president. Most constitutional scholars disagree sharply, saying there is clear historic precedent for trying defendants who have left office and indeed Trump was still in office when he was impeached.
The departure of Bowers and Deborah Barberi, two South Carolina lawyers, was described by a source familiar with the situation as a “mutual decision”.
Three other lawyers associated with the team, Josh Howard of North Carolina and Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris of South Carolina, also parted ways with Trump, another source said.
It was unclear who would now represent the former president at the trial. His White House lawyers at his first impeachment trial last year, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, are not expected to be a part of the proceedings.
“The Democrats’ efforts to impeach a president who has already left office is totally unconstitutional and so bad for our country,” said Jason Miller, a Trump adviser.
“In fact, 45 senators have already voted that it is unconstitutional. We have done much work, but have not made a final decision on our legal team, which will be made shortly,” Miller said.
Speaking to civil rights advocate Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Senate majority leader and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer said the House impeachment managers are gathering explicit video and audio of Trump’s comments and the subsequent deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January, as they attempt to overcome resistance from Republicans to the trial and the conviction of the former president,” Axios reported.
They “are going to show the American people, vividly, on film, what happened there in the Capitol, what Trump said,” he said.
Schumer added: “There’s a lot of bull going on with these Republicans … the only healing will come if we take full accountability.”
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is keen to defend Trump in the Senate trial, the New York Times reported, despite the debacle as he led baseless and at times farcical challenges to the election result.
However Giuliani is a potential witness because he addressed the Trump rally on January 6, 2021. – The Guardian with Reuters contributed reporting.
