Former President Donald Trump’s new impeachment lawyers are no strangers to seeing their names in headlines: David Schoen represented self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone (before Trump commuted his sentence) and met with infamous convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a few days before he committed suicide (but he says Epstein was murdered), and Bruce Castor, Jr. was the district attorney who declined to prosecute Bill Cosby in 2004.

News broke on Saturday that the original five attorneys on Trump’s legal team for his second impeachment trial had parted ways with the former president, and Trump had brought on Schoen and Castor to replace them.

Stone, a former Trump adviser, was convicted of seven counts of lying to Congress and the FBI and witness tampering, and sentenced to forty months in prison. Stone was due to report to prison last July, but Trump commuted his sentence.

Trump’s decision to protect his longtime friend from prison was met with loud criticism, including from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who penned an op-ed for the Washington Post to defend the work of his office as proper and in compliance with the law, and point out that Stone “remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”

Of course, Stone was not without his defenders, and some of the most fervent were on Fox News, including host Sean Hannity, who scored the first interview with Stone after the news broke of his commutation, along with his attorney, Schoen.

“This commutation is a great tribute to President Trump,” said Schoen during that July 2020 Hannity appearance, launching into a screed attacking Mueller and the other investigators involved in the case as “rotten to the core” and “ethically bankrupt” and profusely thanking Trump for recognizing that Stone’s trial was “unfair” and saving his client from prison.

This would be far from the first time that a flattering Fox News appearance preceded being hired by Trump: both his coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas and attorney Jenna Ellis reportedly caught his eye after signing his praises on the Murdoch-owned network.

Unsurprisingly, Stone has continued to staunchly defend Trump in public, including backing his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen and speaking at pro-Trump rallies, such as the January 5 one in Washington, D.C. pictured at the beginning of this article, one day before the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In a September 2020 interview with the Atlanta Jewish Times, Schoen lauded Stone as “very bright, full of personality and flair,” and described the case against him as “very unfair and politicized.”

“I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world,” Schoen bragged in the interview. The reporter noted that Schoen had also “worked with accused rapists, capital murderers and international narcotics dealers.”

Schoen met with Epstein on August 1, 2019, just days before he was found unresponsive in his cell on August 10. Schoen has spoken with multiple media outlets about that meeting, adamantly stating that he believed the accused sex trafficker was murdered.

“I saw him a few days earlier,” Schoen told Fox Nation. “The reason I say I don’t believe it was suicide is for my interaction with him that day. The purpose of asking me to come there that day and over the past previous couple of weeks was to ask me to take over his defense.”

“I still think he was murdered,” he told the Atlanta Jewish Times last September.

Castor was the district attorney for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania who declined to prosecute Cosby for an alleged 2004 sexual assault. In a press release, Castor wrote that he had “conclude[d] that a conviction under the circumstances of this case would be unattainable,” and therefore “decline[d] to authorize the filing of criminal charges in connection with this matter.”

The post One of Trump’s New Impeachment Lawyers Represented Roger Stone And Says Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself, The Other Declined to Prosecute Bill Cosby first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2Yy2Px2