Senate Television via AP
- Trump impeachment lawyer Bruce Castor Jr. explicitly acknowledged Biden won the presidency.
- “The American people just spoke, and they just changed administrations,” Castor said.
- Trump reportedly believed that his lawyers recognizing Biden’s win would be “admitting defeat.”
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Bruce Castor Jr., one of former President Donald Trump’s defense lawyers in his second impeachment trial, explicitly acknowledged President Joe Biden’s victory and said the American people were “smart enough” to vote in a new administration.
While Castor’s presentation during the first day of the trial was rambling and difficult to follow, he did clearly state that the American people elected Biden, a fact that Trump spent months denying.
Castor argued that Trump should not be convicted and barred from holding federal office because the American people made a conscious choice to boot him from office.
“The reason I’m having trouble with the argument is that the American people just spoke, and they just changed administrations. So in the light most favorable to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle here, their system works,” Castor said.
“The people are smart enough, in the light most favorable to them, they’re smart enough to pick a new administration if they don’t like the old one, and they just did,” he added.
That statement undercut both their own arguments in pre-trial briefs that Trump's speech on January 6 was justified because he believed the election was fundamentally "suspect," and Trump's repeated claims that the election was rigged.
"And he's down there at Pennsylvania Avenue right now, wondering, why none of my stuff is happening up at the Capitol," Castor said of Biden.
Trump's first set of impeachment lawyers reportedly quit in part because he insisted that they argue that his repeatedly disproven claims of voter fraud justified the former president and his allies spending the two months attempting to overturn the election result in the legal system.
There is no proof of widespread voter or election fraud in the 2020 election. An intergovernmental working group, including officials from the Department of Homeland Security ,affirmed that the 2020 election was the most secure in the United States' history and that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
Notably, Trump's lawyer's pre-impeachment brief referred to Biden as "the former vice president" at multiple points.
And the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday, "Trump has made clear to advisers that he absolutely doesn't want his lawyers saying that Biden beat him fair and square, even if they don't make the legitimacy of the election their main line of reasoning at the trial," according to toa a person familiar with the matter.
The Beast reported that Trump believes his lawyers acknowledging Biden won fairly "amount to Trump admitting defeat" in the trial.