Harking back to the 1973 Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, CNN likes to use retired 81-year-old attorney John Dean. Once legal counsel to Nixon, Dean famously turned on his boss, giving all the dirt to the Senate Watergate Committee, eventually forcing Nixon from office Aug. 9, 1974. While Dean says the impeachment case against 73-year-old President Donald Trump is more compelling, Nixon authorized a burglary of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Last time anyone checked, burglary falls into the “other” category of high-crimes-and-misdemeanors. Dean and CNN’s anti-Trump pundits can’t cite any crime committed by Trump, insisting that House Democrats can make up whatever high-crimes-and-misdemeanors they want. House Democrats charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Calling the president’s impeachment brief a “scorched earth” strategy, Dean has no comment when it comes to House Democrats making up their own crimes for Trump’s impeachment. Dean calls Trump defense brief “scorched earth” because it mentions House Democrats trying to overturn the 2016 election through impeachment. Far more scholarly than Dean, fellow octogenarian emeritus Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz insists Democrats’ impeachment articles don’t meet the Constitutional test of “treason, bribery or other crimes and misdemeanors.” Dershowitz reminds Dean the framers kept the impeachment bar high so that an angry House mob could not use their Article 1 powers for political purposes. Dershowitz contends that House Democrats lowered the bar so low for Trump that no future president would be safe from extreme partisan politics.
Republicans have been transparent what they intend to do in tomorrow’s opening arguments: They promise to undermine Democrats impeachment case. In contrast to the Nixon impeachment proceedings, not one Republican supports Democrats’ case against Trump. Dean recalls that seven-of-17 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined 21 Democrats to back at least one article of impeachment against Nixon. Not one Republican today backs the two articles of impeachment against Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have accused House and Senate Republicans of breaching the oaths of office not backing impeachment. Republicans don’t back impeachment because, as Desrshowtiz says, Trump has not committed an impeachable offense. That’s not a “scorched earth” policy, that’s the U.S. Constitutional.
Written by White House Counsel Pat Cipolione and Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow, the legal impeachment brief calls the impeachment a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election,” something Dean calls “unsophisticated.” Yet if Dean really paid attention to the brief, he knows that Dershowitz fashioned a solid Constitutional argument against impeachment. No where in the Constitution does it give Congress the legal right to make up its own high-crimes-and-misdemeanors to charge any president of the opposing party. Republicans have a clear record the day Trump was sworn in Jan. 20, 2017 that at least some House members, like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), devoted themselves to impeaching Trump. When the 2018 Congress was sworn in Jan. 3, 2019, freshman Congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) called for Trump’s impeachment.
Pelosi resisted calls for impeachment until the progressive wing of the Party led by Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Min.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep.Ayanna Presley (D-Mass.) demanded Trump’s impeachment. Once Special Counsel Robert Mueller cleared trump of Russian collusion in the 2016 campaign March 23, 2019 Democrats led by Schiff, Nadler and late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), worked in overdrive to find impeachable offenses in the Mueller report. Schiff, Nadler and Cummings accused Trump of obstruction of justice, a serious felony. Yet when it came to the Dec. 13, 2019 impeachment articles, obstruction of justice was dropped. Then suddenly Sept. 25, 2019 a so-called “whistleblower” came forward claiming Trump committed impeachable offense in a July 25, 2019 taped phone call with 40-year-old Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky.
Schiff denied knowing anything about the “whistleblower” until he admitted Oct. 13, 2019, that he in fact had contact with the “whistleblower” before receiving the complaint Sept. 25, 2019. All of these events, especially Democrats’ promise to impeach Trump from Day One, led Republicans to reject the Democrats’ case. “I think it’s actually going to insult some of the lawyers in the Senate,” Dean said. “If their more detailed brief is of the same tone, they’re making a serious mistake,” referring to the idea that Democrats use impeachment to overturn the 2016 election. Dean knows there a lot more to the Republicans argument than overturning the 2016 election. He knows that not one Republican backs the House case because Trump did not commit any impeachable offenses. Dershowitz’s case is really about House Democrats abusing their Article 1 authority to get rid of Trump.
