Senators have had to play dual roles in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. They’re not only witnesses to the insurrection he incited, but also the jury that will decide whether or not his conduct warrants conviction. But for a select group of pro-Trump lawmakers, there’s apparently been a third hat to wear: informal advisers to the ex-president’s bumbling legal team.
After Democrats wrapped up their case against Trump on Thursday, Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee huddled for roughly an hour with Bruce Castor and David Schoen, evidently to go over strategy. “I just wanted to sit down and say, ‘Okay, what are y’all looking to put forward?’ and to share our thoughts in terms of where things are,” Cruz recalled in a Fox News interview Thursday evening. “And certainly what I urged to the Trump defense lawyers was to focus on [on the legal standard of incitement].” On Friday morning, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins reported that the three senators specifically intended to give Trump’s legal team “advice for the rebuttal” to Democrats’ arguments.
“There is no chance whatsoever there will be 67 votes to convict him,” Cruz said Thursday, claiming that House impeachment managers failed to prove there was any link between Trump urging his throngs of angry supporters to march to the Capitol to “fight like hell” for him and the deadly riot that transpired there immediately afterward. “They haven’t come remotely close to demonstrating President Trump’s conduct violated the law, constituted incitement,” the Texas senator added, likening Trump’s speech to the support that Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, voiced for Black Lives Matter protests last year. “She urged the violence to continue,” Cruz falsely claimed, triggering a gentle rebuke even from Fox host Shannon Bream. “Encouraging protests is different from encouraging violence,” Bream said, “so I think we need to be careful in how we describe the words.”
Cruz, of course, has a personal stake in seeing Trump acquitted; along with Senator Josh Hawley, he helped promote the former president’s lies about election fraud and led the objection to the certification of the results in the Senate. If Trump is guilty, it’s awfully hard to argue that the others who spoke at the pre-riot rally or advanced the aims of the insurrectionists don’t share in it. But in openly strategizing with Castor and Schoen, who earlier this week performed a clumsy good cop/bad cop routine in rambling opening statements that enraged their client and befuddled even some Republicans, Cruz, Graham, and Lee are doing away with even the pretense of impartiality—an indication that, for the personal danger Trump put them in, they have absolutely no intention of breaking ranks with him. “The end result of this trial is obvious to every single person in the room,” Cruz said.
For their part, Trump’s lawyers, who have already said they won’t need all their allotted time to make the case for his innocence, appeared grateful for the help. “It was a very nice thing to make us feel welcome here,” Schoen said after the meeting, adding that the three pro-Trump impeachment jurors who offered them counsel are “friendly guys.”
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