Trump Lawyer Believed ‘Very Fine People’ Hoax Until Trial Prep

David Schoen, one of the attorneys who represented former President Donald Trump at his Senate impeachment trial, told an interviewer that he had believed the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax until the day he prepared his argument.

The hoax is the claim, by Democrats and the mainstream media, that Trump called violent neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia “very fine people” in remarks in 2017.

In fact, Trump said the neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be “condemned totally.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence debunked the hoax during his debate with Kamala Harris last year. However, House impeachment managers cited the hoax to claim that Trump condoned violence by his supporters.

In his arguments before the Senate, Schoen specifically demonstrated that the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax was a lie:

U.S. Senate

The hoax was one of several examples Schoen provided in which the House impeachment mangers had manipulated or falsified evidence.

However, Schoen told Jewish Insider that he had only learned it was a lie himself earlier that same day:

Schoen told JI he stayed up through the night and did not finish his remarks until an hour before he delivered them to the Senate.

He only became familiar with one of his main talking points — that the Democratic impeachment managers and the media had misrepresented Trump’s comments about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — while preparing his speech.

“I learned preparing this thing for that day — I really learned the day before, maybe even the morning of my talk — that it’s a much longer speech. He actually affirmatively denounced white supremacists, white nationalists and all of that a couple of times during his talk,” Schoen said. Until that point, he said, he had been dissatisfied with Trump’s response to Charlottesville.

One of Trump’s lawyers, Michael van der Veen, later referred to the “fine people hoax” in closing argument (video at top).

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.