A top lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment fight said he drafted a much broader array of charges against President Trump than what House Democrats ultimately levied against him.
Norm Eisen, who served as counsel for the panel’s Democrats during the impeachment process, said he put together a list of 10 articles of impeachment a month before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a Ukraine-focused investigation into Trump last year.
“Having lived on the Hill for a year, I do think impeachment would have gone differently. I don’t think there would have been an impeachment if we had insisted on all 10 of those articles, however meritorious I may feel they are,” Eisen told NPR.
“Politics is the art of the possible. And Chairman [Jerrold] Nadler of the Judiciary Committee, who I worked for; Chairman [Adam] Schiff of the Intelligence Committee, who is a leader on all these matters; and Speaker Pelosi ultimately were able to come together around a set of articles that unified the caucus and that we were able to get through,” he added.
Trump was impeached on two charges — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — in December but was acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate in February.
Eisen, who has a new book coming out, A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, said he drafted so many articles because Trump’s “misconduct is so broad.”
“His whole pattern of misconduct, the collusion in the [Robert] Mueller report, the obstruction of justice that the special counsel found, the hush money payments, which are illegal campaign finance, and so much more,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything like it in American history. So, we needed to start with a very broad base to work our way through to the articles that we thought could make it through the House. And that’s just what we did.”
