A transition staffer for the Trump administration is urging for President Trump’s impeachment after reaching a “tipping point” with the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report.
J.W. Verret, a law professor at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School who worked on every Republican presidential transition team in the last decade, said he was never an admirer of Trump but described himself as a “pragmatist about Trump.”
Despite concerns about Trump’s “lack of character,” Verret said he believed the focus should be on “guiding his policy decision in a constructive direction.” But, he said, last week’s release of the Mueller report was a “tipping point for me.”
“I wanted to share my experience transitioning from Trump team member to pragmatist about Trump to advocate for his impeachment, because I think many other Republicans are starting a similar transition,” Verret, who left the Trump transition team in October 2016 because it wasn’t a good fit, wrote in an op-ed published in The Atlantic.
Mueller’s redacted report says he did not find collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election. But the report did not clear Trump on the issue of obstruction of justice, fueling calls from Democrats for further investigations, and, in some cases, impeachment proceedings.
Already the House Judiciary Committee has issued a subpoena to former White House counsel Don McGahn, who Mueller found was instructed by Trump to fire Mueller. McGahn refused to comply with the order. He left the Trump administration in 2018.
“Politics is a team sport, and if you actively work within a political party, there is some expectation that you will follow orders and rally behind the leader, even when you disagree,” Verret said. “There is a point, though, at which that expectation turns from a mix of loyalty and pragmatism into something more sinister, a blind devotion that serves to enable criminal conduct.”
Verret said there are “roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice” included in Mueller’s report and argued that the “elaborate pattern of obstruction may have successfully impeded the Mueller investigation.”
“Republicans who stand up to Trump today may face some friendly fire,” Verret concluded. “Today’s Republican electorate seems spellbound by the sound bites of Twitter and cable news, for which Trump is a born wizard. Yet, in time, we can help rebuild the Republican Party, enabling it to rise from the ashes of the post-Trump apocalypse into a party with renewed commitment to principles of liberty, opportunity, and the rule of law.”
