This Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee’s top Republican Doug Collins of Georgia kicked off that panel’s first public impeachment inquiry hearing with a lengthy rant that included a diatribe against witnesses, who he claimed were supposedly unprepared yet in the spotlight anyway. One of those witnesses, Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan, directly denounced Collins’s insinuation as “insulting” and showed him up with the fact that she’d read all the previous testimony transcripts in preparation for her own appearance.
She began:
‘Here Mr. Collins, I would like to say to you, sir, that I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearing because I would not speak about these things without reviewing the facts. So I’m insulted by the suggestion that, as a law professor, I don’t care about those facts.’
Pamela Karlan *is not* messing around: “Here Mr. Collins I would like to say to you, sir, that I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearings … I’m insulted by the suggestion that as a law professor I don’t care about those facts.” pic.twitter.com/TXhmZXVWiM
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 4, 2019
Collins had also suggested that Americans in general didn’t care about the facts and would question why the committee had brought four Constitutional law professors including Karlan in for testimony. In fact, an average of about one in two Americans actively supports the impeachment inquiry, so Collins is grasping at straws here, at best.
Karlan went on from the above to directly implicate Trump in impeachable offenses. At the core of the impeachment inquiry has been the plot that he and his associates enacted to try and get Ukraine to produce damaging political intel on the Bidens and Democrats in general. If that plot had been successful, the dirt could have been useful to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign in a similar fashion to the 2016 Russian disinformation campaigns against Hillary Clinton.
Karlan explained:
‘Everything I read on those occasions tells me that when President Trump invited — indeed, demanded — foreign involvement in our upcoming election, he struck at the very heart of what makes this a republic to which we pledge allegiance. Drawing a foreign government into our elections is an especially serious abuse of power because it undermines democracy itself.’
She is not the only witness to have delivered such a direct condemnation of Trump’s behavior. Fellow law professor and additional Wednesday witness Michael Gerhardt added:
‘The record compiled thus far shows the president has committed several impeachable offenses, including bribery, abuse of power, and soliciting of personal favor from a foreign leader to benefit himself personally, obstructing justice, and obstructing Congress.’
Michael Gerhardt: “The record compiled thus far shows the president has committed several impeachable offenses, including bribery, abuse of power, and soliciting of personal favor from a foreign leader to benefit himself personally, obstructing justice, and obstructing Congress.” pic.twitter.com/W4J7871BWb
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 4, 2019
Talk about blunt! How much more direct can you get? Of course, it’s long been an established fact that Republicans in Congress seem like they’d keep sticking with the “Trump is innocent” line even if the president stood in front of them and shouted: “I’m guilty!”
On his own time, the president has resorted to bizarre proclamations about the supposed lack of mental fitness of his opponents, which seems like projection of insecurity as much as anything else.
Speaking to reporters at this week’s NATO summit, he said about the House intel chairman:
‘I think he’s a maniac. I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man. And he lies.’
In other words, Trump and his cronies have got nothing.
