Trump Has Scraped Together a New Impeachment Legal Team After His Old One Abandoned Him

Had you forgotten that Trump is being impeached again? I had, sort of. With the former president banned from Twitter and the Biden era in full swing, I’ve pivoted to worrying incessantly about the pandemic and complaining about the general trajectory of the Democratic Party.

In any case, the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump is imminent, but up until a few hours ago, Trump had no impeachment legal team to speak of, having been abandoned by the five lawyers who were originally supposed to represent himat next week’s Senate trial.

According to CNN, the lawyers quit due to irreconcilable differences pertaining to the legal strategy Trump was pushing for, which involved double (tripling? quadrupling?) down on the false election fraud claims that led to his impeachment in the first place. The lawyers had instead hoped to focus on tedious legal definitions to argue that a president couldn’t be convicted for an offense after leaving office. I’m no brilliant legal mind, but it seems to me that if you’re trying to win a case for a president who used stolen-election conspiracy theories to incite violence, the latter strategy is probably the way to go. Nonetheless, Trump has insisted that things be done his way, which has made it difficult for him to find replacements.

But on Sunday night, the Trump team announced that the president had managed to scrape together at least two people willing to defend him: Attorneys David Schoen and Bruce Castor, Castor being the disgraced lawyer known for declining to prosecute Bill Cosby after offering him a “secret agreement.” Schoen notably defended Trump acolyte Roger Stone.

Though Trump’s office emphasized the supposed unconstitutionality of impeaching a former president in a press release announcing the new legal team, one has to think that Schoen and Castor must be at least somewhat willing to go along with Trump’s desired approach. It’s not like they have their sterling reputations to be worried about.