Meandering Performance by Defense Lawyers Enrages
Trump
The former president was particularly angry at Bruce
L. Castor Jr., one of his lawyers, for acknowledging the effectiveness of the
House Democrats’ presentation.
Maggie
Haberman
By Maggie
Haberman
Feb. 9,
2021
On the
first day of his second impeachment trial, former President Donald J. Trump was
mostly hidden from view on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm
Beach, Fla., moving from the new office that aides set up to his private
quarters outside the main building.
Mr. Trump
was said to have meetings that were put on his calendar to coincide with his
defense team’s presentation and keep him occupied. But he still managed to
catch his two lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David I. Schoen, on television —
and he did not like what he saw, according to two people briefed on his
reaction.
Mr. Castor,
the first to speak, delivered a rambling, almost somnambulant defense of the
former president for nearly an hour. Mr. Trump, who often leaves the television
on in the background even when he is holding meetings, was furious, people
familiar with his reaction said.
On a scale
of one to 10, with 10 being the angriest, Mr. Trump “was an eight,” one person
familiar with his reaction said.
And while
he was heartened that his other lawyer, Mr. Schoen, gave a more spirited
performance, Mr. Trump ended the day frustrated and irate, the people familiar
with his reaction said.
Unlike his
first Senate impeachment trial, just over a year ago, Mr. Trump has no Twitter
feed to do what he believes he does better than anyone else — defend himself —
and to dangle threats of retaliation over the heads of Republican senators who
serve on the impeachment jury.
So the
former president was forced to rely on a traditional method of defense —
lawyers in the well of the Senate chamber, and allies spreading word about
their plans to defend him against the charge of “incitement of insurrection”
for his role in the deadly assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 by a mob of
supporters.
In the
lead-up to the trial this week, Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers said he seemed
to be taking his second impeachment more or less in stride, preoccupied with
his golf game and his struggling business, and trying to ignore what was
happening in Washington.
But the
fact that he struggled to retain a full team of lawyers for the trial was a
source of concern to some of his aides. None of the lawyers from the first
impeachment trial who defended Mr. Trump returned for the second round. And
most of the team he initially hired abruptly parted ways with him days before
the trial began.
Several of
the former president’s advisers and associates said they cringed at the
performance by Mr. Castor, a former prosecutor from Pennsylvania who spoke
first after the House Democratic managers presented their impeachment case
using graphic videos of the Jan. 6 attack, delivering a meandering defense.
An adviser
to Mr. Trump, speaking on background as the lawyer was making his defense,
insisted that Mr. Castor had always planned to try to reduce the temperature in
the chamber because the former president and his aides anticipated an emotional
presentation by the Democrats.
But Mr.
Castor undercut that by declaring at the outset that he and Mr. Schoen had
switched their presentation order because the Democrats’ case had been so good.
That one of
his own lawyers praised the prosecutors surprised and infuriated Mr. Trump,
people familiar with his reaction said. And other Trump allies said privately
that some members of the legal team seemed surprised by the raw clips from the
riot that the Democrats showed, even though the House managers had signaled for
days that was their plan.
Mr. Schoen
presented a more forceful argument, with the type of intensity that Mr. Trump
prefers. Mr. Schoen, who is based in Atlanta, argued that the trial itself was
unconstitutional because the former president is no longer in office, and that
the effort sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights.
But even
with his acquittal all but certain, Mr. Trump was far from satisfied with the
arguments made on his behalf.
The president’s
advisers distributed more pointed “talking points” in the morning and the
afternoon, excoriating Democrats later in the day for opening the case “exactly
as we all expected them to: by glorifying violence and intentionally misleading
on the Constitution.”
“In doing
so, the Democrats set a horrible precedent for the rest of the impeachment
trial by making clear they will selectively edit — which is a polite way of
saying ‘lying’ — everything from video footage to remarks from legal scholars
to the Constitution itself,” the talking points said.
In the
first impeachment trial, which focused on Mr. Trump’s call to the president of
Ukraine seeking investigations into President Biden and his son, Hunter, as Mr.
Trump withheld congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, Republicans
and Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued the conduct was not impeachable.
But outside
of arguing that Mr. Trump’s speech before the rampage was protected by the
Constitution, Republicans generally stayed away from defending the events of
that day.
The lack of
a defense on the central charge of the impeachment case — and Mr. Castor’s
difficulty articulating a clear point — did not escape Senate Republicans.
Senator
Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, castigated Mr. Trump’s defense
lawyers in explaining why he voted “yes” on the question of whether the Senate
has jurisdiction in the case even though Mr. Trump is out of office.
Asked why
he believed they did poorly, Mr. Cassidy replied to reporters, “Did you listen
to it?”
“It was
disorganized, random — they talked about many things, but they didn’t talk
about the issue at hand,” he said.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
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