House Judiciary Committee Report: President Can Be Impeached for ‘Motives’ Without Breaking Law

4. The report cites radical left-wing activists committed to impeaching Trump. The report cites “scholars” such as Zephyr Teachout, who is on the advisory board of a group called “Impeach Trump Now.” It also cites Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, who declared in December 2016 that Trump’s impeachment should “begin on Inauguration Day.” It ignores contrary views, even by left-wing sources like Cass Sunstein, whom it quotes selectively (see below).

5. The report invents an absurdly broad “abuse of power” standard. Sunstein wrote in 2017 that “abuse of power” was, by itself, too vague: “Almost every American president has, on more than one occasion, passed the bounds of his power, in the sense that his administration has done something that it is not lawfully entitled to do.” (They cite his book on impeachment, but ignore that point.) Notably, “abuse of power” is not in the Constitution.

6. The report actually defends the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and cites it as precedent. The Johnson impeachment is almost universally regarded as an error. Yet the report, after conceding that a president “cannot be removed” simply because of “unpopular policies,” argues that Johnson should have been removed for exactly that, because he had “illegitimate motives.” This astonishing claim, citing Tribe, is worth quoting in full:

Rather than directly target President Johnson’s faithless execution of the laws, and his illegitimate motives in wielding power, the House resorted to charges based on the Tenure of Office Act. But in reality, “the shaky claims prosecuted by [the House] obscured a far more compelling basis for removal: that Johnson’s virulent use of executive power to sabotage Reconstruction posed a mortal threat to the nation—and to civil and political rights—as reconstituted after the Civil War … [T]he country was in the throes of a second founding. Yet Johnson abused the powers of his office and violated the Constitution to preserve institutions and practices that had nearly killed the Union. He could not be allowed to salt the earth as the Republic made itself anew.” Viewed from that perspective, the case for impeaching President Johnson rested on his use of power with illegitimate motives.

7. The report bends over backwards to justify impeachment without any crime being committed. The report spends a great deal of space arguing that a president does not have to commit an actual crime to be impeached — a claim hotly debated among scholars. It notes that previous impeachments have included charges of “non-criminal” acts, but ignores the fact that no presidential impeachment has ever proceeded without any criminal acts alleged.

8. After saying crimes are not necessary, the report cites the criminal grand jury process. Immediately after arguing that impeachment is not a criminal process (see above), the report cites the criminal grand jury, in which the accused has few legal rights or protections, in an attempt to justify the House’s bizarre impeachment process, in which President Trump — unlike Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton — has been denied basic legal rights.

9. The report claims that Trump has more rights than Nixon and Clinton did. That false claim ignores the fact that unlike his predecessors, Trump has not been allowed legal representation in the key fact-finding stage of the process, which Democrats — for the first time — moved to the secretive Intelligence Committee. Moreover, it ignores that Republicans have been denied the ability to object to witnesses called by the Democrat majority.

10. The report claims that hearsay evidence is sufficient to impeach the president. After noting that the usual rules of evidence do not apply in the House, the report ignores that the only witnesses with direct knowledge of the president’s intentions testified that there was no “quid pro quo” regarding aid to Ukraine. One, Gordon Sondland, said he believed Trump wanted a “quid pro quo” for a White House meeting but had no direct knowledge to show it.