HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – Bruce L. Castor Jr. picked up his cell phone, but he didn’t have time to talk.
“I’m 12 minutes from prime time,” he said before going to the US Senate source to defend his client, Donald Trump, as one of two lawyers in the ex-president’s second impeachment lawsuit.
Maybe it was the highlight for him.
Castor’s moment in the national splendor, broadcast from the source of the Senate Chamber, was seen as an itinerant and sometimes aimless, hour-long exposition in search of a point. And that was exactly the view of several Republican senators, including staunch supporters of the president.
“I thought I knew where he was going, and I really didn’t know where it was going,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, RS.C., one of Trump’s most ardent donors.
Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, added that Castor “rumbled on and on.”
It ran counter to Castor’s reputation as a confident, talkative, media-savvy district attorney from the Philadelphia suburbs who had seemed as comfortable in front of a camera as he was in a courtroom for decades.
Certainly, he was not Trump’s first choice for a lawyer, and perhaps not in the top ten of the limited options among those willing to take the case. He had to prepare his arguments within days of the former president’s legal team quitting. And he had to learn the rules of impeachment, a thin legal specialty.
Castor gets the chance to make a different impression when he starts presenting Trump’s defense, expected Friday.
Still, he stumbled into his first appearance on Tuesday, referring to himself as the ‘chief prosecutor’ for Trump’s defense, before correcting himself, calling House managers – the real prosecutors in the case – ‘brilliant’ and their presentation ‘well done. ‘. He also acknowledged something the former president doesn’t have, which is that Trump lost the election
Rather than advocating a legal theory, he instead tried a political theory, that the Democrats only brought the impeachment because they wanted to rule out any chance that Trump would run for president again.
“Let’s see why we’re really here,” said Castor. “We are really here because the majority in the House of Representatives does not want to accept Donald Trump as a political rival in the future. That is the real reason why we are here. “
He said he made that point to strip the bark of all other appearance. “No one says it that straight, but unfortunately I can speak that way,” said Castor.
Castor, 59, is familiar with politics and is elected the ambitious prosecutor in cowboy boots and pinstripes in one of the state’s wealthiest and most populous counties in suburban Philadelphia.
There he was used to securing murder convictions and stood in front of the lights and cameras of Philadelphia TV stations, making him known in the most politically dominant region of the state.
But if he wanted to use that position as a springboard to higher office, the plan didn’t work. In the middle of his eight years as a Montgomery County district attorney, he hired the Republican Party’s handpicked candidate for attorney general, throwing it with the establishment in an expensive and nasty primary. He lost by about 5 percentage points.
Castor became a provincial commissioner but was sidelined by his colleagues, a republican and a democrat, who forged a working majority that stiffened him. Castor hung his superintendent’s certificate in the bathroom, above the office toilet.
In 2013 he became a fierce critic of the then government. Tom Corbett, the Republican who defeated Castor for Attorney General in 2004.
He toured the state investigating a primary challenge to Corbett’s reelection bid, but Castor dropped it, lamenting that not enough people were “willing to stick their necks out and behind me”. Corbett’s unpopularity ultimately led to his historic defeat.
Castor then ran to his old job as a prosecutor amid emerging allegations that comedian Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted dozens of women and that he – Castor – had refused to sue. one of those cases ten years earlier.
His decision not to prosecute became the central line of attack for his Democratic opponent in the race. He defended himself saying there was not enough evidence to successfully prosecute, but he lost and later went on to testify in Cosby’s defense.
In doing so, he also questioned the credibility of the victim, Andrea Constand, who sued him for defamation. They resolved the matter in 2019.
Before Cosby was convicted in a second trial, Castor re-emerged as Pennsylvania’s first-ever attorney general.
In it, he intervened to make legal decisions in the administration for the controversial and politically abandoned state attorney general – Kathleen Kane, a Democrat – as she fought charges of leaking protected investigative information to infect a rival and lie to a grand jury.
She was soon convicted and left Castor as Acting Attorney General of the State – the position he sought so long ago – but only for two weeks until an appointee of the Governor took over.
His re-emergence as impeachment attorney for Trump was a dizzying moment for the political and legal world of Pennsylvania. Rob Gleason, a former state party chairman who aided in Trump’s reelection campaign, called Castor to congratulate him, but hadn’t spoken to him in five or six years.
“I didn’t know who it was going to be, I didn’t even think about it, but yeah, I was surprised it was,” Gleason said.
Castor had burned bridges with much of the Republican establishment.
“The Republican Party is dead in Pennsylvania, never to rise again,” he said to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015.
He had virtually stayed out of sight, seemingly content never to run to the office again.
He hadn’t campaigned for Trump and an old friend, Brian Miles, told me the investigator that the two men had never discussed Trump before Castor recently said he was ready for the job.
Castor answered the mystery, narrating the Washington Post that his cousin, a House Republican staff attorney, had “served as a channel.”
A few weeks later he sat there, checking notes on a yellow notepad in the well of the Senate and speaking as the world watched.
Despite all the criticisms of him, Castor suggested that Trump was not critical of his performance.
“Far from it,” he said. And of the broader criticism, he said, “only one person’s opinion matters.”
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