Pennsylvania’s political world is buzzing about the lawyer who will defend the former president in his second impeachment trial.
PHILADELPHIA — The suburbs here played a leading role in Donald Trump’s defeat. Now, the former president is counting on a longtime elected official from the biggest among them — Montgomery County — to defend him in his second impeachment trial.
The news that Bruce Castor, a former Montgomery County commissioner and district attorney, is representing Trump set ablaze Pennsylvania’s political world — and nowhere more than in the suburban giant that delivered a landslide margin against Trump in 2020. As a result, Trump’s campaign sued the county afterward, claiming it improperly counted mail-in ballots.
Trump announced Sunday that Castor, who also served briefly as Pennsylvania’s acting attorney general, is leading his legal team along with lawyer David Schoen during his upcoming trial. The Senate could use impeachment to bar Trump from ever serving in federal office again.
The development immediately touched off questions over whether Castor was brought onboard precisely because of his prior job as a county commissioner in one of the places where Trump was most obsessed with baseless claims of election fraud. It also surprised many insiders who saw Castor as a moderate Republican who often reached across the aisle, leading to speculation that he might be repositioning himself to run for Senate or governor in 2022.
“I was shocked. Bruce has been in private practice,” said Ken Lawrence, a Democratic Montgomery County commissioner. “Bruce was a law-and-order, middle-of-the-road conservative Republican.”
Those who know Castor said the former prosecutor might have been drawn to the gig for a reason other than interest in higher office: his well-known love for the cameras. As an aggressive district attorney with a big personality in the 2000s, he frequently appeared on television while pursuing high-profile homicide cases that garnered the attention of the news media.
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Pennsylvania’s political world is buzzing about the lawyer who will defend the Donald Trump in his second impeachment trialhttps://t.co/gG942P4rjf
— POLITICO (@politico) February 2, 2021
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