Legal scholars testify on impeachment

House Judiciary Committee opens hearings to establish standards for case against Trump

The impeachment process against US President Donald Trump moved from the evidence phase to the prosecution phase on Wednesday as the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee heard testimony from constitutional law experts about the basis for impeachment.

It was the committee' s first impeachment hearing and its goal is to establish the standards for impeachment to determine whether actions by Trump meet the constitutional threshold for removing a president from office. Democrats are expected to draft articles of impeachment as soon as next week.

Three law professors invited by Democrats who control the committee and the House — Noah Feldman of Harvard, Pamela Karlan of Stanford and Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina — agreed that Trump's conduct far exceeds the high crimes and misdemeanors bar set in the Constitution and warrant impeachment and removal from office.

"The president's serious misconduct, including bribery, soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader in exchange for his exercise of power, and obstructing justice and Congress are worse than the misconduct of any prior president," said Gerhardt, who also testified during impeachment proceedings against former president Bill Clinton.

"If what we're talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable. This is precisely the misconduct that the framers created the Constitution, including impeachment, to protect against," he said.

Feldman said that Trump's move to withhold a White House meeting and military assistance from Ukraine while he demanded political favors from its president was a classic impeachable abuse of power.

"If we cannot impeach a president who uses his power for personal advantage, we no longer live in a democracy," he said. "We live in a monarchy or a dictatorship."

Jonathan Turley of George Washington University was invited to testify by the committee's Republicans. He said he wasn't a Trump supporter but that Trump shouldn't be impeached because the Democratic impeachment case against him is dangerously "slipshod" and premature. He argued the case is destined for "collapse in a Senate trial".

"I am concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger,'' Turley said. "If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president."

Turley said there was no direct evidence to show that Trump withheld nearly $400 million in military aid from Ukraine and a White House meeting from that country's president in order to aid the campaign to pressure Ukraine to pursue Trump's desired investigations of his political rivals.

Turley agreed with the other law professors that a quid pro quo to force the investigation of a political rival in exchange for military aid can be impeachable, if proven, but he said that the evidence has to be stronger and that witnesses like Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, and John Bolton, the former national security adviser, must be heard from and not just spoken about by other witnesses.

Turley also disagreed that Trump engaged in obstruction of Congress by withholding documents and ordering senior officials not to testify before the House Intelligence Committee. He said Democrats should wait for federal courts to resolve the various subpoena disputes.

The committee' s first impeachment hearing comes a day after Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released a 300-page report accusing Trump of pressuring Ukraine — a nation dependent on US support for its war against Russia — to investigate former vice-president Joe Biden and his son. They also allege that the president obstructed their investigation and intimidated witnesses along the way.

From the opening minutes of the hearing, Republicans repeatedly raised procedural objections. They sought to delay the hearing by a week, to subpoena House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, and to subpoena the whistleblower who first revealed Ukraine allegations.

Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler quickly quashed each effort, calling votes along party lines to push them aside.

The White House refused an invitation for Trump and his lawyers to participate, but it hasn't ruled out the possibility of taking part in future hearings.

Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called the impeachment inquiry a "simple railroad job'' and that Democrats were basing their case on disputed facts. "We have just a deep-seated hatred of a man who came to the White House and did what he said he was going to do," Collins said.

Collins criticized the three lawyers who said they support Trump's impeachment. "You couldn't have possibly actually digested the Adam Schiff report from yesterday, or the Republican response in any real way," he said.

His comment brought a sharp response from Karlan:

"I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearing because I would not speak about these things without reviewing the facts.

"I'm insulted by the suggestion that as a law professor I don't care about those facts. Everything I read on those occasions tells me that when President Trump invited, indeed demanded foreign involvement in our upcoming election, he struck at the very heart of what makes this a republic to which we pledge allegiance."

In his opening statement, Nadler said, "President Trump welcomed foreign interference in the 2016 election. He demanded it for the 2020 election. In both cases, he got caught. And in both cases, he did everything in his power to prevent the American people from learning the truth about his conduct."

Nadler emphasized that former special counsel Robert Mueller's findings on Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump's efforts to thwart that probe could also be considered obstruction of justice.

"When we apply the Constitution to those facts, if it is true that President Trump has committed an impeachable offense — or impeachable offenses — then we must move swiftly to do our duty and charge him accordingly," Nadler said.