Bruce Castor, a defense lawyer in former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment trial, says he’s “feeling pretty good” following his client’s acquittal.
During a Saturday interview with Fox News following the verdict, the lawyer emphasized what he saw as the failings of the presentations of House impeachment managers.
“Well, they failed miserably on all sorts of grounds, not the least of which is the jurisdiction over somebody out of office,” he said. “The Constitution is quite plain that once you’re out of office, that’s the only active remedy upon the bringing up of an impeachment article.”
Castor added that “the thing that I think really sunk their ship is they not only manufactured evidence and passed it off as true, but also selectively cut and re-cut the president’s statements such that they were out of context. And when you put them all in the right context, and when you found the correct pieces of evidence, it showed deceptiveness and deceit on their part.”
Trump’s lawyers previously complained that a video showed by impeachment managers during the beginning of their arguments was deceptively edited by placing the events of Jan. 6 out of order. It was not immediately clear what piece of evidence Castor thought was “manufactured.”
In a New York Times article on Feb. 7, Rep. Jamie Raskin was shown looking at a computer with two tweets, one of which was improperly dated though the text is difficult to see.
“There is significant reason to doubt the evidence the House managers have put before us,” attorney David Schoen said during his defense of the president. He also accused the impeachment managers of having “created a false representation of tweets.” Schoen acknowledged, however, that the error was remedied before it was presented to the Senate floor.
Trump was impeached by the House on an article of incitement of insurrection in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. Saturday’s acquittal after the Senate voted 57-43 in favor of convicting Trump, but the vote total did not reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict. Trump was acquitted about a year after the Senate acquitted him on two impeachment articles charging him with corruption and obstruction of Congress.
