If you harbored any doubts that Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler would turn his impeachment hearing into a political circus and the second act of the Schiff Show, the Democrats’ witness list should dispel them.
Nadler and his fellow Democrats have invited three liberal law professors to help them interpret the drivel Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff assembled into a “report” following his embarrassing, two-week failure of an impeachment investigation. They are calling these professors to back-end attempt to justify their impeachment scam. This is laughable and outrageous.
Why? All three of these “impartial experts” are telling Democrats exactly what they want to hear.
These “experts” do not care what’s actually contained in Schiff’s biased, ridiculous report any more than Schiff cared about lying about working with the “whistleblower” to contrive this entire shameful episode. They care even less about what happened on a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Like the Democrat politicians running this circus, all three of them want Trump impeached, embarrassed, and, if possible, thrown out of office because they do not like his politics.
These professors are liberal activists who are still livid that Trump defeated their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, and they’ve spent the last three years looking for something, anything, that might give them a chance to kick Trump out of office.
The most blatant partisan at the hearing is Stanford’s Pamela Karlan. Karlan was second in command at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Barack Obama, and she now chairs the board of directors at the American Constitution Society, the country’s most powerful association of liberal lawyers.
Karlan has spent much of her career fighting against the very policies that propelled Trump to the White House, and she’s been open about her fury over his success. Just after his election, Karlan signed a letter suggesting that President-elect Trump’s campaign rhetoric, proposed Cabinet and judicial nominations, and policies all threatened the Constitution. In 2017, she was interviewed extensively by the far-left Salon about how Trump was an “illegitimate president.”
Despite Karlan’s record of disparaging Trump, which includes her enthusiastic embrace of the debunked Russia collusion conspiracy theory, the Democrats expect us to believe that she came to her opinion that Trump should be impeached because of a phone call with the president of Ukraine in July.
The second witness, Harvard professor and Bloomberg News columnist Noah Feldman, also has a long paper trail to contradict the notion that Adam Schiff’s report was what finally convinced him of the need to impeach Trump.
Almost immediately after Trump won the 2016 election, Feldman was indulging #Resistance fantasies about the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., allegedly violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
In March 2017, he said that Trump deserved to be impeached for pointing out, correctly, that the Obama administration had surveilled his associates. Two months later, Feldman claimed Trump should be impeached for allegedly asking former FBI Director James Comey to stop trying to intimidate and entrap former Trump administration official Michael Flynn. By June 2017, he was calling for Congress to “act before the courts” and impeach Trump over what former special counsel Robert Mueller might find. In 2018, he called Trump’s 2016 joke about Russia finding Hillary’s emails impeachable. At the start of this year, it was Buzzfeed’s discredited report about the president supposedly telling Michael Cohen to lie that Feldman deemed “clearly impeachable.”
During the current Ukraine fracas, Feldman has stayed true to form, writing article after article siding with Democrats and deriding Trump — just as he has done throughout the Trump administration.
Even the supposedly non-partisan observer that Democrats are offering, University of North Carolina Professor Michael Gerhardt, is obviously here to make impeachment happen and try to convince you, the court of public opinion, that this isn’t the scam it absolutely is. The Bill Clinton transition team member is a leading expert on impeachment, and can’t conceal his excitement at Trump being subjected to the process.
In anticipation of Democrats dragging Trump through the impeachment ringer this year for a vague something that may or may not have happened and may or may not have been bad, Gerhardt issued the first new edition of his textbook on impeachment in almost 19 years. But that wasn’t all. Last year, he published a whole new volume, Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know, to satiate the #Resistance’s thirst for impeachment-related material.
Gerhardt strives to maintain an air of impartiality, but the comments he’s made during the Trump era reveal that he has entertained the notion of impeaching the president not only for “collusion,” but also for being, in Gerhardt’s opinion, too racist.
Nadler and the Democrats “generously” (at least by the standards Schiff set during his one-sided inquiry) allowed Republicans to invite a solitary law professor, George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley, to rebut the trio of Democrat witnesses. Turley is no partisan witness anyway, as a clear political opponent of Trump. Keep a close eye on how the Democrats question the one person they know isn’t firmly in their corner. Their undisguised hostility toward even a hint of dissent will tell you all you need to know about how unseriously they’re treating the impeachment process.
Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) is a constitutional law attorney and the senior legal adviser for the Trump 2020 campaign. She is the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
