team deeper look his impeachment defense

Absent that, his presentation was irrelevant to the matter at hand. If Starr wants to get rid of the impeachment clause as it pertains to presidents, he’s welcome to offer a constitutional amendment and see if he can convince states to vote for it. You can’t read a clause (impeachment) out of the Constitution, simply because you wish it wasn’t there while Republicans are in the White House. In fact, he spoke of the entire Clinton impeachment saga in the passive voice, repeatedly saying “those who lived through the Clinton impeachment” as if he was just a bystander at the station instead of the conductor driving the train.Įven if you take Starr’s personal hypocrisy out of it, he was making a terrible legal argument. Did Starr explain how his own presidential impeachment investigation led him to this new understanding? Not hardly. Starr invented an entirely new standard during his time in the spotlight: He said that the impeachment provision should be used against judges, but not against presidents. Ken Starr the Trump defender, acted like he wasn’t also Ken Starr the independent counsel who was hired to investigate the Whitewater real estate deal, found nothing he could “get” President Bill Clinton on, and kept investigating well past his mandate and all the way into Monica Lewinsky’s closet. Did Starr recognize his own role in bringing about the “age” he now warns against? No. His argument warned that we were living in an “age of impeachment,” where the solemn constitutional remedy had become a mere political tool among rival parties. Ken Starr walked into the Senate as a legal pariah and, amazingly, managed to lower himself even further. Their arguments sounded like they were cribbed from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, because they largely were. The Republican defense team is confident that senators are too afraid of Trump to cross him, and perhaps even more confident that his base of support will never abandon him. The lawyers were not trying to convince a jury of senators, or even the American people. In fact, there was only one audience for all of this: Donald Trump. One would be forgiven for thinking all the legal gibberish was merely designed to distract and confuse those who tuned into the trial. And finally, Alan Dershowtiz argued that abuse of power is not an impeachable offense, while self-owning the fact that essentially no credible legal scholars agree with him. Robert Ray argued that presidents cannot be prosecuted. Eric Herschman argued that… well, he held a MAGA rally from the well of the Senate and argued that President Barack Obama should be impeached. Pam Bondi argued that corruption is rampant in Ukraine because of Joe and Hunter Biden. Patrick Philbin argued that presidents never have to comply with congressional subpoenas they don’t like. Jane Raskin argued that Rudy Giuliani was a distraction, but also a great guy who did nothing wrong.

Michael Purpura argued that nobody ever heard Trump order a quid pro quo. Related.Ken Starr argued that impeachment is no longer a constitutional provision that should be applied to a president.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. government over the search, seeking to stop Department of Justice authorities from reading the materials until a third-party court official can be appointed to review the documents and determine if any should be returned to him because they’re protected by attorney-client or executive privilege.

On Monday, Trump filed suit against the U.S. He has also since argued he was allowed to take sensitive materials to Mar-a-Lago because he had a “standing order” to declassify any documents he took from the Oval Office to his White House residence ― a claim many of his own former top advisers have labeled absurd and false. In the wake of the search, Trump baselessly accused to FBI of planting evidence at his home and called reports he may have had documents pertaining to nuclear weapons a “hoax.” The search warrant revealed the FBI was investigating Trump for a potential violation of the Espionage Act. 8 and removed boxes of documents, some of which reportedly included classified materials. with the latest Republican defense of Trump keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago /kAhNahMqFnĭonald Trump and his allies have produced a rotation of sometimes-contradictory excuses since the FBI searched the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Aug.

'If Donald Trump actually still had the nuclear codes, it'd probably be good.'

Team deeper look his impeachment defense