One of the lawyers on Trump’s legal team says he was thrown off by the final vote on impeachment. But while most Americans were not surprised that the former president was acquitted by the split Senate, David Schoen thought the defense would have had more support from Republican senators.
“I was pretty confident based on discussions with the senators…that we would have something like 45 or 46 votes,” he told The Jewish Insider.
In the end, the Senate voted to acquit Trump by a vote of 57 to 43, with seven GOP senators breaking party lines to find Trump guilty.
While the votes to convict were expected from GOP Senators Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse and Patrick Toomey, they were joined by two unforeseen votes from Senators Bill Cassidy and Richard Burr.
Looking back, Schoen blamed the loss of those two votes on the defense team’s performance during the question-and-answer period.
“I didn’t think that our side answered the questions the way they should have been answered. That might have had some influence,” he said.
Last Friday, Collins and Murkowski asked Trump’s legal team when the former president learned of the Capitol breach and what his response to the news was, but Schoen’s co-counsel, Michael van der Veen, avoided answering the questions directly and blamed the House instead.
“With the rush to bring this impeachment, there’s been no investigation into that. And that’s the problem with this entire proceeding,” van der Veen replied to the senators.
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Schoen also told The Jewish Insider about butting heads with van der Veen and Bruce Castor, the other lead attorney, and the disorganization of the team.
Van der Veen and Castor were brought on last minute after a dispute between Trump and attorney Butch Bowers, who was supposed to represent Trump in the impeachment trial, led to an abrupt split between the two.
Schoen said when Castor arrived, he began managing who on the team would do what, “giving him and his partner [attorney Michael Van Der Veen] leading speaking roles,” despite the fact that Schoen had been working on the defense’s argument for the last couple of weeks.
As Trump’s legal team began making their opening statements on Tuesday, many Republicans came down hard on Castor, who rambled on.
Schoen, who was originally supposed to deliver the opening argument, recalled, “The House put on a pretty good presentation. [Castor] seemed to think he was the best lawyer on the team, or something. So he stood up and said, ‘I think I better jump in here.’ He jumped in and obviously it was like a filibuster. It was not a good presentation.”
“I tried to back Castor up because everybody was coming down on him after that first performance. I thought, This guy’s career is going to disappear,” Schoen added. “But he didn’t.… He still thought he did a good job.”
Despite tension on the team, Schoen called the experience on the Senate floor “inspiring.”
“I love that place,” the Alabama-based lawyer said. “I got to know some of the senators—at least on the Republican side.… They were just very friendly and warm. But I really felt like it was a very weighty experience.”
Unlike Schoen, lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said he was unsurprised by the final vote, suggesting that the Democrats would not have enough votes for a conviction even if witnesses had been called to the stand.
“We left it totally out there on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and every senator knew exactly what happened,” Raskin told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
“We could have had a thousand witnesses, but that could not have overcome the kinds of silly arguments that people like [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell and [West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore] Capito were hanging their hats on,” he added.
