Former President Trump’s lawyers are now arguing on the Senate floor over the constitutionality of the impeachment trial.
The attorneys who signed up to head Trump’s defense team bring a curious history of experience. David Schoen, a veteran civil and criminal defense attorney, and Bruce L. Castor, Jr., a noted attorney and former district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, defend him in the trial.
The lawyers, both of whom have legal careers riddled with curiosities, joined Trump’s team a day after five members of his defense left, basically collapsing the team.
Trump’s lawyers are tasked with devising a defense strategy for a former president accused of inciting a deadly uprising in the Capitol, something that, if convicted, could also lead to his never being able to hold federal office again.
For Schoen, whose website says he “focuses primarily on conducting complex civil and criminal cases before courts and appeals courts,” Trump is just the latest controversial figure his career has brought him in recent years.
Schoen was part of the team of attorneys that represented Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime friend and former counsel, on the appeal of his conviction regarding issues that Stone took with the jury. Stone had that appeal dropped after the then-president commuted his jail sentence, but before Stone was given a full presidential pardon for convictions, including lying to Congress to protect Trump.
Schoen, who has a law degree from Columbia University and a doctorate in law from Boston College according to his biography, is chairman of the Criminal Justice Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights Litigation Committee, according to his biography.
Castor, meanwhile, served as a Montgomery County district attorney from 2000 to 2008, before serving two terms as a county commissioner, according to a release from Trump’s office.
He was involved as a prosecutor in at least one high-profile case when, in 2005, he refused to prosecute Bill Cosby after Andrea Constand reported that the actor had inappropriately touched her at his home in Montgomery County, citing “ insufficient credibility and admissible evidence ‘.
Cosby was later tried and convicted in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting Constand at his home in 2004, despite Castor arguing in a pre-trial hearing that he had already promised the state not to prosecute the actor.
Read more about the lawyers here.