Bruce L. Castor: Trump is irritated by the lawyer who tries to defend him in the impeachment | International

One of the novelties of this impeachment It is the presidential silence, that of the current occupant of the White House, Democrat Joe Biden, and that of the former president and defendant, Donald Trump. The first one pretends that the trial did not happen, keeps the agenda and does not say a word, the second has been blocked from social networks and is not using other channels to express his feelings. The Republican’s sealed lips are perhaps the most squeaky thing in Washington after four years of rioting. What would he have tweeted the day Mitch McConnell, the head of the Senate Republicans, blamed him for the assault on the Capitol? What would he have said of the 10 congressmen who voted in favor of judging him? Without the need for Twitter, what is known is that the action of his lawyer this Monday, the first day of the process, has driven him crazy.

Bruce L. Castor got the House’s attention (for bad). The lawyer began his intervention with a slip, presenting himself as a prosecutor, and continued to focus the argument on Trump’s freedom of expression, when the session had to decide whether it is constitutional to subject a president who no longer occupies power to impeachment, as is the case Republican. To his disgust, he also referred to the defendant as “former president” and validated the electoral results by saying: “The American people have just spoken and have decided to change the government.” He also claimed that Trump “was removed by the voters.” With this, he argued that, if he had committed a crime, they only had to arrest him, instead of continuing with the impeachment.

At times, he seemed to lose the thread, and admitted that he was going to change the presentation they had planned after the shocking way in which prosecutors began their presentation, a devastating 13-minute video in which the most violent episodes of the assault with Trump’s harangues that same day.

The Republican followed the day on television from his mansion in Palm Beach (Florida), according to sources around him have told the US press, and his anger grew. As a measure of the quality of the former president’s defense, the impressions of Alan Dershowitz, who was the Republican’s lawyer in the previous impeachment (“I have no idea what he’s doing,” he said on television about Castor) or a senator from his party like John Cornyn of Texas: “The president’s attorney has only rambled.”

Castor – former Pennsylvania prosecutor known for having rejected the prosecution of actor Bill Cosby, now convicted – is part of a legal team to which Trump signed less just 10 days before the start of the trial, since he broke with the lawyers with whom he was working at the last minute for discrepancies. The other is David Schoen, a Georgia lawyer who defended former adviser Roger Stone in the investigation of the Russian plot. Stone obtained a presidential pardon from Trump. This Wednesday, a journalist asked the Castor if the former president had complained about his actions in the previous session, to which the legal representative replied: “Quite the contrary.”

As the Senate bustles with the room impeachment In American history and Trump follows events in his particular Florida exile, Joe Biden tries to ignore the matter. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the president did not plan to spend “too much time” seeing him and even refused to answer whether the Democrat thought he should be found guilty. “Well, he ran against him in the election because he thought he was not suitable for the position,” he answered a direct question about it, “but he will leave this matter to the Senate.”

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