Lawyer who met with Epstein in final days hired by Trump for impeachment trial

With his impeachment trial looming in just nine days, former president Trump announced he had a new team of lawyers on Sunday, including David Schoen, who met with disgraced businessman and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein about representing him before his death. 

“It is an honour to represent the 45th President, Donald J Trump, and the United States constitution,” Mr Schoen, who was already helping Mr Trump prepare for the Senate trial, said in a statement

Mr Schoen will be joined by attorney Bruce L Castor Jr, the former district attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which is just outside Philadelphia. While in office between 2000 and 2008, Mr Castor famously declined to prosecute comedian Bill Cosby over allegations he drugged and molested a girl in 2004.

“The strength of our constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history,” Mr Castor told The Philadelphia Inquirer in a statement. “It is strong and resilient — a document written for the ages, and it will triumph over partisanship yet again, and always.”

Before agreeing to work with Mr Castor and Mr Schoen, Mr Trump reportedly clashed with members of his previous legal team because he wanted them to focus on his thoroughly debunked claims of election fraud, rather than constitutional issues surrounding the trial, which marks both the first time a president has been impeached after leaving office and the first time a single president has been impeached twice. 

Mr Schoen has previously supported the conspiracy that Epstein did not die by suicide, as authorities concluded, in 2019 while in custody ahead of a trial for sex-trafficking charges. 

“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 defence,” he told Fox Nation. 

“We came to an agreement during the course of that discussion,” he added. 

House managers have already delivered the articles of impeachment, which accuse the president of “incitement to insurrection” to the Senate, and the impeachment trial begins on 9 February.