HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – Bruce L. Castor Jr. answered his cell phone, but he did not have time to talk.
“I’m twelve minutes from the first time,” he said before going to the well of the U.S. Senate to defend his client, Donald Trump, as one of the two defense attorneys in the former president’s second trial..
This may have indicated the climax for him.
Castor’s moment in national glory, which was broadcast from the fountain of the Senate Chamber, was seen as a nagging and sometimes pointless hour-long confusion in search of a point. And that was just the opinion of several Republican senators, including steadfast supporters of the president.
“I thought I knew where he was going, and I really did not know where he was going,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., who is one of Trump’s most ardent supporters.
Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, added that Castor “just ran on and on and on.”
This was contrary to Castor’s reputation as a sure-footed, lazy, media-savvy prosecutor from the Philadelphia suburbs, who for decades looked just as comfortable in front of a camera as in a courtroom.
To be sure, he was not Trump’s first choice for a lawyer, and perhaps not among the top ten of the limited options. among those willing to take the matter. He had to prepare his arguments within days after the former president’s legal team went on strike. And he had to learn the rules of an indictment, a rare legal specialist.
Castor will have the chance to make a different impression when he starts proposing Trump’s defense, Expected Friday.
Yet he stumbled in his first appearance on Tuesday, referring to himself as the “chief prosecutor” for Trump’s defense, before correcting himself, and called House executives – the real prosecutors in the case – ‘brilliant’ and their presentation ‘well done’ . He also acknowledged something that the former president did not yet have, namely that Trump lost the election..
Instead of arguing a legal theory, he instead tried a political one, that Democrats only brought the accusation to because they withhold any chance that Trump wanted to be presidential again.
“Let’s understand why we’re really here,” Castor said. “We are really here because a majority in the House of Representatives does not want to face Donald Trump as a political competitor in the future. That’s the real reason we’re here. ”
He said he made the point of stripping the bark of any other pretense. “Nobody says it so clearly, but unfortunately I have a way of talking like that,” Castor said.
Castor, 59, is familiar with politics and is elected as the ambitious, cowboy-booted and pinstripe-fit prosecutor from one of the state’s richest and most populous provinces in suburban Philadelphia.
There he was used to securing convictions for murders and standing in front of the lights and cameras of the TV stations in Philadelphia, which made him known in the state’s most politically dominant region.
But if he wanted to use the post as a springboard to a higher office, the plan would not succeed. In the midst of his eight years as district attorney of Montgomery County, he used the Republican Party’s candidate for attorney general by hand and plunged the institution into an expensive and nasty by-election. He lost by about 5 percentage points.
Castor then became a commissioner of the country, but he was ousted by his colleagues, a Republican and a Democrat, who forged a working majority that froze him. Castor hung his certificate from the commissioner in the bathroom above the office toilet.
In 2013, he became a powerful critic of the then government. Tom Corbett, the Republican who beat Castor in 2004 as attorney general.
He toured the state and investigated a primary challenge for Corbett’s re-election offer, but Castor abandoned it.and regrets that not enough people were ‘willing to stick their necks out and stab me’. Corbett’s unpopularity eventually led to his historic defeat.
Castor then offered him his old job as district attorney amid emerging allegations that comedian Bill Cosby sexually assaulted dozens of women and that he – Castor – did not want to be prosecuted. one such case a decade earlier.
His decision not to prosecute becomes his Democratic opponent’s central attack in the race. He defended himself by saying there was not enough evidence to successfully prosecute, but he lost and later testified for Cosby’s defense.
In doing so, he also questions the credibility of the victim, Andrea Constand, who sued him for defamation. They settled the case in 2019.
Before Cosby was convicted in a second trial, Castor erupted at the scene as Pennsylvania’s first attorney general.
In it, he stepped in to make legitimate decisions in the administration for the protested and politically abandoned Attorney General of the state – Kathleen Kane, a Democrat – while fighting his complaint of the leak of protected investigative information to smear a competitor and to lie to a large jury about it. .
She is soon convicted and leaves Castor as acting attorney general of the state – the position he had applied for so long ago – but only for two weeks until a nominee took over from the governor.
His reappearance as an attorney-general for Trump was a harsh moment for Pennsylvania’s political and legal world. Rob Gleason, a former chairman of the state party that helped with Trump’s re-election campaign, called Castor to congratulate him, but did not speak to him for five or six years.
“I did not know who it was going to be, I never thought about it, but yes, I was surprised it was him,” Gleason said.
Castor burned bridges with much of the Republican establishment.
“The Republican Party is dead in Pennsylvania, never to rise again,” he declared. to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015.
He remained almost out of sight, seemingly satisfied that he never wanted to run for office again.
He did not run for Trump, and a longtime friend, Brian Miles, said the Enquirer that the two men had never discussed Trump before Castor recently mentioned he was ready for work.
Castor answered the riddle and told the Washington Post that his cousin, a lawyer from the Republican House, ‘served as a channel’.
There he spent several weeks checking notes on a yellow legal block in the well of the Senate and speaking while the world watched.
Despite all the criticism of him, Castor suggested that Trump not criticize his performance.
“Far from it,” he said. And about the broader critique, he said, “only the opinion of one person matters.”
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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter https://twitter.com/timelywriter.