Speaking to Jewish Insider this Tuesday, Donald Trump's impeachment defense lawyer David Schoen said he almost quit the eve of closing arguments in Trump's impeachment trial, and even blamed his co-counsels for losing the votes of several GOP senators.
"I was pretty confident … that we would have something like 45 or 46 votes," he said. "I didn't think that our side answered the questions the way they should have been answered. That might have had some influence."
While Schoen said that Trump was "gracious" towards him, he wouldn't confirm if he'd been paid for his work.
"I don't really like to discuss that kind of thing," he said. "But I will say that he absolutely fulfilled every commitment made to me."
Like most observers of Trump lawyer Bruce Castor's incoherent arguments, Schoen agreed that it was lacking.
"The House put on a pretty good presentation. [Castor] seemed to think he was the best lawyer on the team, or something. So he stood up and said, 'I think I better jump in here,'" Schoen recounted. "He jumped in and obviously it was like a filibuster. It was not a good presentation."
"I thought, 'This guy's career is going to disappear. I don't know how he's going to get up in the morning,'" Schoen added. "But he didn't… He still thought he did a good job."
In an interview with Fox News, Castor defended his performance. Castor said decided to go off script after House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin delivered an emotional speech.
"I don't like reading bad stuff about me in the newspaper any more than anyone else does, or my legal colleagues around the country saying I'm stupid," Castor explained, "but the reason I made the change was precisely so that in lowering the temperature in the room, the public coverage would be more about what I said than about what the House Managers said."