“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” — Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
As public hearings on impeachment begin this week, we will see the case for and the case against impeaching President Donald Trump. The facts are largely undisputed, but each side has its version of them.
The Democrats will argue that in his July 25, 2019 telephone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, seen in the context of months of negotiations between American and Ukrainian diplomats, Trump made it known that if the Ukrainian government wanted the $391 million in military and financial aid that Congress authorized and ordered, it first must offer, or announce that it was seeking, dirt on his likely 2020 political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden or his son Hunter. That implicates a presidential violation of two federal statutes: One is the prohibition of solicitation of campaign help from a foreign government, and the other is the prohibition of bribery.
View the complete November 16 article by Andrew Napolitano on the National Memo website here.
President Trump dismissed criticism Friday that he had tried to intimidate a witness in the impeachment inquiry, saying a disparaging tweet about former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as she testified before a House panel was “free speech.”
Former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig this week admitted he was stunned by President Donald Trump’s justification for blocking the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn — and he called the legal rationale behind it “nuts.”