HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – Bruce L. Castor Jr. answered the cell phone, but didn’t have time to talk.
“I’m 12 minutes from prime time,” he said, before heading to the U.S. Senate well to defend his client, Donald Trump, as one of two attorneys defending the former president’s second impeachment trial..
Maybe it marked the high point for him.
Castor’s moment in the national gaze, televised from the well of the Senate chamber, was seen as a horizontal disquisition and sometimes useless in search of a point. And that was just the opinion of several Republican senators, including staunch supporters of the president.
“I thought I knew where I was going and I really didn’t know where I was going,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., who is among Trump’s most ardent sponsors.
Senator John Cornyn of R-Texas added that Castor “just went wandering.”
He disagreed with Castor’s reputation as a confident, talkative, media-savvy prosecutor in the suburbs of Philadelphia who for decades had seemed as comfortable in front of a camera as in a courtroom.
Of course, it wasn’t Trump’s first choice for a lawyer, and it may not have been among the top ten limited options among those who are willing to take on the case. He had to prepare his arguments in a matter of days after leaving the former president’s legal team. And he had to learn the rules of an indictment trial, a rarefied legal specialty.
Castor will have a chance to make a different impression when he begins to present Trump’s defense, expected Friday.
Still, he stumbled upon his first appearance Tuesday, referring to himself as the “chief prosecutor” of Trump’s defense, before correcting himself, and said House officials, the real prosecutors. of the case, they were “brilliant” and their presentation “well done.” He also acknowledged something the former president did not have, namely that Trump lost the election.
Instead of arguing for one legal theory, he tried another for politics: Democrats only brought dismissal. because they wanted to rule out any possibility that Trump would run for president again.
“We’re going to understand why we’re really here,” Castor said. “We are really here because the majority of the House of Representatives does not want to face Donald Trump as a political rival in the future. That’s the real reason we’re here. “
He said he made that point to strip the bark of any other claim. “No one says it so clearly, but unfortunately I have a way of speaking that way,” Castor said.
Castor, 59, is familiar with politics, being chosen as the ambitious taxman with a cowboy button and fitted to one of the richest and most populous counties in the state on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
There, he was accustomed to securing convictions for murder and being in front of the lights and cameras of Philadelphia television networks, which made him well known in the most politically dominant region of the state.
But if I wanted to use that position as a springboard for senior offices, the plan would not work. In the middle of his eight years as Montgomery County District Attorney, he took on the Republican Party’s chosen candidate for state attorney general, and ended up settling in costly and unpleasant primaries. He lost about 5 percentage points.
Castor became county commissioner, but found himself sidelined by his colleagues, a Republican and a Democrat, who forged a working majority that froze him. Castor hung his commissioner’s certificate in the bathroom, above the office toilet.
In 2013 he became a strident critic of the then governor. Tom Corbett, the Republican who had defeated Castor in 2004 in the attorney general’s primaries.
She toured the state exploring a major challenge to Corbett’s re-election candidacy, but Castor abandoned her., lamenting that there are not enough people “who were willing to take my neck off and support me.” Corbett’s unpopularity led to his historic defeat.
Castor appeared in his former district attorney job amid emerging allegations that comedian Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted dozens of women and that he – Castor – had declined to prosecute. one of these cases a decade earlier.
His decision not to prosecute became the central line of attack for his Democratic opponent in the race. He defended himself by saying there was not enough evidence to successfully prosecute, but he lost and later testified in defense of Cosby.
In doing so, he also questioned the credibility of the victim, Andrea Constand, who sued him for defamation. They resolved the case in 2019.
Before Cosby was convicted in a second trial, Castor erupted again as Pennsylvania’s first attorney general.
In it, he intervened to make legal decisions in the administration for the state’s attorney general, confronted and politically abandoned, Democrat Kathleen Kane, as she struggled to filter protected investigated information to soil a rival and lie to the grand jury in respect. .
She was soon convicted, leaving Castor as acting Attorney General of the State — the position he had long sought — but only for two weeks until he was appointed governor.
His re-emergence as Trump’s dismissal lawyer was a moment that was scratched for Pennsylvania’s political and legal world. Rob Gleason, a former president of the state party that helped Trump’s re-election campaign, called Castor to congratulate him, but he hadn’t spoken to him in five or six years.
“I didn’t know who he would be, I didn’t even think about it, but yeah, I was surprised it was him,” Gleason said.
Beaver had burned bridges with much of the Republican establishment.
“The Republican Party has died in Pennsylvania, never to rise again,” he said. to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015.
He had been virtually out of sight, seemingly happy not to run for office again.
He hadn’t campaigned for Trump and said a longtime friend, Brian Miles the researcher that the two men had never discussed Trump before Castor mentioned recently that he was within reach of the job.
Castor answered the mystery, explaining it the Washington Post that his cousin, a lawyer for Republican House staff, had “served as a conduit.”
A few weeks later, he was there, checking notes on a yellow legal block in the Senate well and talking as the world watched.
Despite all the criticism leveled at him, Castor suggested that Trump did not criticize his performance.
“Far from it,” he said. And of the broader criticisms, he said, “only one person’s opinion matters.”
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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter.