One of the two lead attorneys for ex-President Donald Trump’s impeachment legal team is Bruce Castor, 59, who is well-known throughout Eastern Pennsylvania for a couple of things.

The Lafayette College graduate was a Montgomery County district attorney who briefly served as acting state attorney general during the chaotic Kathleen Kane saga. He also served as Kane’s appointed solicitor general, but he is perhaps best known for his role in the controversial Bill Cosby case.

Castor and another attorney were last-minute subs for the original Trump team. The former team was dismissed because of Trump’s insistence that his defense be based on the argument that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, a path that the team and other Trump stalwarts warned is ill-conceived.

South Carolina lawyer Karl S. “Butch” Bowers Jr. and four other attorneys left about a week before Trump’s Feb. 9 Senate trial. The House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time, on this occasion for his role in inciting the riotous attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 after a Washington, D.C., rally he engineered.

In the earlier case in 2020, Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate.

In 2005, Castor declined to charge comedian Bill Cosby after Andrea Constand reported that Cosby had drugged and molested her a year earlier. Castor promised the comedian, who was known as “America’s dad” for his portrayal of Dr. Cliff Huxtable on the “The Cosby Show,” that he would never be tried in criminal court in return for testimony in a civil lawsuit.

Cosby’s testimony was later used against him in the 2018 criminal case that sent him to prison for 3 to 10 years. Castor later settled a defamation case brought by Constand because of statements he made against her.

A Republican, Castor was brought in by Democrat Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who appointed him to a $150,000-a-year job as state Solicitor General.

In this way, Kane sidelined her No. 2 guy, Bruce Beemer, with whom she clashed publicly and whom she savaged after he testified against her, leading to her conviction and prison term for leaking grand jury information, then lying about it.

That’s what Kane did to her political enemies, and it was this vengeance-is-mine flaw that led to her eventual downfall.

Not even a month after Castor’s appointment, Kane resigned following the conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, and Castor became acting attorney general, a position he told friends was his dream job.

The dream lasted less than 13 days. Gov. Tom Wolf had other ideas and appointed Beemer to fill out Kane’s unexpired term. In the next election, Josh Shapiro won the job and is today serving his second four-year term after being re-elected last November.

My area Republican contacts know the Castor story well. He was a bigger-than-life personality who wore his signature cowboy boots and thrived on publicity. He was definitely not camera-shy, that’s for sure. After he was elected Montgomery County district attorney, he rode five first-degree murder convictions in a row to statewide prominence. He later served on the Montgomery County Board of County Commissioners.

When he ran for district attorney again, in 2015, he was defeated by Kevin Steele in a bitter, name-calling race.

Although it appeared that his political career was dead in the water, Castor emerged as Kane’s Solicitor General when the Scranton native got rid of Beemer.

After her legal troubles started and the state Bar Association suspended her law license, Kane allowed Castor, for all intents and purposes, to run the AG office for about eight months before her resignation.

According to associates, in his own mind Castor thought he had done such a great job that he should have been nominated by Wolf to complete Kane’s term then run for a full four-year term.

Earlier, in 2004, Castor ran for attorney general but lost to Tom Corbett, who went on to become a one-term governor. Castor told associates that he believed that if he had won the AG race that year, he would have ultimately been elected governor.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com