Trump lawyer requests to suspend impeachment trial during Sabbath

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial that opens on Tuesday could take longer than expected after a leading member of his defense team requested that the proceedings are suspended during the Sabbath so that he can meet his obligations as an observant Jew.

David Schoen, 62, has written to senior figures of both main parties in the US Senate asking for an agreement that the trial is postponed from 5.24pm on Friday until Sunday so that he can observe the Sabbath. In the letter, reported by the New York Times, the lawyer apologises for any inconvenience, adding that “the practices and prohibitions are mandatory for me … so I have no choice.”

Schoen, 62, is an Orthodox Jew attached to the congregation Beth Jacob in his home town of Atlanta, Georgia.

The request presents managers of the trial with a scheduling dilemma. To complete the trial by sundown on Friday would require breakneck speed that could appear unseemly; to delay it until Sunday might push the proceedings into the following week that had been earmarked as a Senate holiday.

Schoen and his fellow defense lawyer Bruce Castor, a former district attorney from Pennsylvania, were brought on at the eleventh hour to represent Trump after the previous defense team quit en masse having refused to play along with Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him.

Schoen has a colourful list of previous clients in both criminal and civil law. Among them are Roger Stone, the longtime friend of Trump who was convicted of lying to Congress but who later received a presidential commutation.

Last September he told the Atlanta Jewish Times: ““I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world.”

Castor also has a checkered professional history. He declined to prosecute Bill Cosby more than a decade before the comic was convicted in 2018.

Trump faces one impeachment count of incitement of insurrection relating to the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January. Five people died as a result of the violence which followed an incendiary rally headlined by Trump.