“I don’t even have a secretary,” said Schoen, who, uniquely in the Trump orbit, styled himself as modest to a fault. Indeed, there was a weird and, to many, disturbing ingenuousness about Schoen. The one odd thing that seemed to be known about him was that Jeffrey Epstein had consulted him. Where the entire professional world might do anything not to be associated with Epstein—and here, particularly, when Trump himself had so strenuously tried to conceal his own Epstein connections—Schoen seemed to be proud of his encounter.

“You’ll be fine,” Trump assured him.

Schoen decided this would all be a wonderful civics lesson for his college-age son and daughter. He put them to work doing constitutional research. Oh, and Schoen was an observant Jew and would not be able to work on the Sabbath in a trial that was set to run through the weekend.

Panic now was official.

Herschmann, since the last impeachment, had hovered for influence in the Trump White House. While refusing the second impeachment job himself, he was telling everybody the sky was falling in. He and Meadows went back to Castor in Philadelphia. At least the unknown Castor had a firm behind him—albeit, a small, local criminal and personal injury firm—whereas the unknown David Schoen had nobody but himself (and his children).

The Democrats, for their part, had nine lawyers, most former prosecutors, from the House of Representatives, with the backing of their respective staffs, the resources of the House majority, the extra backing of the 1,200-man law firm Cleary Gottlieb, and a team of filmmakers to produce their videos.

By the agreement between Senate Democrats and Republicans, the opening day of the Senate trial, on February 9, would be devoted to the jurisdictional issue—that is, whether the Senate had the standing or right to try a private citizen. Democrats had decided that, despite the peculiarity of trying to remove someone from office who was no longer in office, of course they did. Republicans had decided that this was a much better hill to die on than to try to defend Trump’s behavior and actions on January 6.