WASHINGTON – When former President Donald J. Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial begins this week, two defense lawyers will be placed in the national spotlight: David I. Schoen, an Alabama-based criminal and civil rights attorney, and Bruce L. Castor Jr., A former district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia.
Neither has worked with the other before, and it is still unclear who has primacy as the team’s lead attorney. Their uncertain relationship started when Mr. Trump abruptly hired them when his first defense team was falling apart; they now find themselves trying to organize themselves, without much idea of what to expect.
“We don’t know what the agenda is,” Schoen said in an interview late last week, noting that Senate leaders have yet to announce the rules for the trial. “We don’t know what the order of things will be. We don’t know how much time we will have. “
Mr. Schoen, 62, graduated from Boston College Law School and has had an eclectic legal career for decades.
He has done extensive work in public interest and civil rights cases in the South on issues such as police and prison violence and access to the polls. Among his many cases, he played a significant role in a class action that challenged Alabama’s adoption system and led to improvements, and he represented the Ku Klux Klan successfully challenging a law that forbade them to march wearing hoods and without paying a rate. The American Bar Association honored Mr. Schoen in 1995 for his voluntary legal efforts.
He also worked as a criminal defense attorney, representing a number of sometimes notorious clients, including defendants, rapists and murderers. An avowed supporter of Israel, he also prosecuted Palestinian terrorists and filed a lawsuit against Simon & Schuster for alleged misrepresentations in former President Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid”.
Richard Cohen, former president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that although he thought Trump deserved to be convicted, he considered Mr. Schoen “a good lawyer and a good person” who is attracted to complex and challenging cases and is not afraid to accept sometimes unpopular customers.
A practicing Jew, Mr. Schoen requested that Trump’s impeachment trial be halted if it continues after Friday’s sunset, to allow him to observe Saturday until it ends on Saturday night. Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat and majority leader, said he would “accommodate” the request, which could prolong what both sides hoped would be a quick process.
Castor, 59, who did not respond to an interview request, brings a different set of experiences. After graduating in law from George Washington University, he served two terms as an elected prosecutor in Montgomery County and later as Pennsylvania attorney general. Since then, he has worked as a criminal defense attorney.
He is most famous for his unapologetic defense of his 2005 decision not to sue Bill Cosby after Temple University employee Andrea Constand accused him of drugging and sexually abusing her.
Mr. Castor lost his re-election to an opponent who criticized his treatment of the case and went on to accuse Mr. Cosby of aggravated indecent aggression. Trying to drop the charge, Mr. Cosby’s defense team called Mr. Castor as a witness at a hearing in 2016. He argued that his decision not to sue had been appropriate.
“I came to the conclusion that there was no way the case could improve and get better with time without Mr. Cosby’s confession,” said Castor in the statement. “Andrea Constand’s own actions during that year ruined her credibility as a viable witness.”
But the judge allowed the case to proceed, and Mr. Cosby was convicted in 2018. Ms. Constand subsequently sued Mr. Castor for defamation, and the two settled out of court in 2019. Separately, Mr. Castor sued the Mrs. Constand, arguing that she had filed a defamation case to influence an election in which he failed to regain his position as district attorney; a judge dismissed the case.
Castor was recommended to Trump and his advisers by his cousin Stephen R. Castor, a lawyer on the Republican team who helped lead the president’s initial defense against his first impeachment in 2019. Stephen Castor clashed with Democrats over attempts to Trump to pressure Ukraine to announce a corruption investigation of Joseph R. Biden Jr., his political rival.
The forces that attracted Mr. Schoen to Mr. Trump’s world date back to the 1990s, when he represented two organized crime convicts. Arguing that prosecutors had unduly withheld evidence that would have helped the defense, Mr. Schoen tried to reverse his convictions, but failed.
Andrew Weissmann was one of those promoters. When the special lawyer who led the investigation in Russia, Robert S. Mueller III, hired Mr. Weissmann as a deputy, he became the favorite target of Trump’s allies seeking to discredit the broader investigation. Mr. Schoen criticized Mr. Weissmann on Fox News and other conservative media.
The relationship narrowed after Mueller’s office won the conviction of Roger J. Stone Jr., Trump’s longtime friend and adviser, for crimes such as lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses. Mr. Schoen was handling Mr. Stone’s appeal before Mr. Trump granted him clemency. Mr. Schoen said he believed he was recommended to the president for the impeachment trial as a result of that connection.
Mr. Castor and Mr. Schoen are now expected to defend the former president against an accusation of “incitement to insurrection” related to the Capitol riot by their supporters on January 6. The case focuses on Trump’s months-long campaign to make his followers believe the falsehood that he had won the re-election, but was denied victory because of fraud, and his exhortations to his supporters at a rally in Washington, just before the riot to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell”, as Congress was formally trying to certify Mr. Biden’s victory.
Both Mr. Castor and Mr. Schoen have been headlines in other cases in which they have expressed expressions of belief not necessarily supported by facts.
In 2002, when Mr. Castor was a public prosecutor, he fought for the release from prison of a man who was exonerated from a DNA test rape conviction. The prisoner, Bruce Godschalk, confessed to the detectives, but he retracted long before his trial, but Mr. Castor was opposed to allowing his DNA to be tested.
When scientific evidence refuted the prosecutors’ case against Mr. Godschalk, Mr. Castor questioned the validity of the test results, although he admitted that he had no “scientific basis” for doing so. Even after more tests confirmed the findings and he was forced to let Mr. Godschalk go, Mr. Castor continued to express doubts about the man’s innocence.
Mr. Schoen made headlines more recently for expressing a belief that goes against an official fact-finding conclusion: the determination of a medical examiner that Jeffrey Epstein, the unfortunate financier and accused of sex crime, died by suicide in the prison in 2019.
Nine days before Mr. Epstein’s death, Mr. Schoen met with him for hours to discuss taking his case. Based on Epstein’s attitude and enthusiasm for new legal strategies, and citing the nature of his injuries, Schoen said he did not think he had killed himself.
“I don’t think it was suicide,” Schoen reiterated in the interview, adding: “I don’t know what happened. I don’t have a conspiracy theory. “
It was reported that Trump and his original legal team, led by Butch Bowers, split because of a conflict over whether his defense should focus on his false claim that the election was stolen.
But Schoen said he started working with Bowers several days before the majority of the team left, and that the explanation for what happened was not accurate. He said there had been a communication error, but he declined to offer further details in addition to insisting that “the president has not pushed any agenda on this issue”.
Castor also denied that Trump pushed them to focus on the legitimacy of election results, telling a Philadelphia radio station that they would instead focus on “technical” legal arguments.
Together, Mr. Castor and Mr. Schoen must argue that the Senate lacks constitutional jurisdiction to try former officials (although it has done so before), and that Trump’s incendiary language before the riot fell short of what might result in an indictment conviction in a criminal court because of the First Amendment.
“It is a terrible chill for passionate political speech, even if it brings this action,” said Schoen.