Trump’s new team to make constitutional case
When Bruce Castor ran for district attorney in Eastern Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County in 2015, the campaign hinged on his decision years earlier not to charge comedian Bill Cosby with sexual assault. And after Mr. Castor lost the race, he sued the woman he blamed for the defeat: one of Cosby’s victims.
His suit, which was dismissed in 2018, made national headlines when the prosecutor who defeated Mr. Castor criminally charged Cosby, eventually sending him to prison.
Now, Mr. Castor is poised to represent another politician dismayed over a recent election loss: former President Donald Trump.
Following a sudden exodus of lawyers who had been working on Mr. Trump’s defense for his Feb. 9 impeachment trial, the former president announced Sunday that he’ll be represented by Mr. Castor and David Schoen — another attorney with ties to several high-profile, controversial defendants, including Roger Stone and Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Castor and Mr. Schoen will take on the job after Mr. Trump’s previous attorneys left over his insistence that they argue he actually won the 2020 presidential election, a false claim the former president has often repeated since November, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Mr. Trump’s team denied that explanation and said the defense would focus on constitutional questions involved in the impeachment trial. And Mr. Schoen also said he plans to focus on attacking the “weaponization of the impeachment process” and arguing that it is not constitutional to impeach a president once he is out of office.
“I am not a person who will put forward a theory of election fraud,” Mr. Schoen told the Post late Sunday night. “That’s not what this impeachment trial is about.”
While Mr. Castor and Mr. Schoen are just stepping into their leading roles on Mr. Trump’s team in the politically fraught impeachment trial, neither is new to controversy.
Mr. Castor, a Republican, served as the top prosecutor in Montgomery County from 2000 to 2008. In 2005, Andrea Constand reported that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted her the previous year, but Mr. Castor declined to pursue criminal charges.
Ten years later, after Ms. Constand filed suit with 13 women volunteering to testify about their own allegations against Cosby, Mr. Castor was forced to account for that decision as he ran for district attorney again. Ms. Constand also sued Mr. Castor for defamation in 2015, just before the election. He publicly suggested there had been inconsistencies in Ms. Constand’s account of the crime, but the growing #MeToo movement made his handling of the Cosby case a key issue in the race. He lost to Democrat Kevin Steele, who chose to prosecute Cosby.