'I Am Insulted': Impeachment Witness Fires Back at GOP Rep.
The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday got off to a fiery start from one of the law professors the committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Doug Collins, had just disparaged.
Collins, as part of the GOP’s effort to discredit the process, argued in his opening statement that for Democrats the calendar — or in other words next year’s presidential election — was driving the impeachment inquiry, not the facts.
He questioned whether the four professors called as witnesses would have had time to digest the report released on Tuesday by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. The report, written after weeks of testimony from diplomats, White House officials and others, accused President Donald Trump of soliciting help from the Ukrainian president to harm his chief political rivals in the 2020 presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden, and to try to promote a baseless theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2017 presidential election. The "overwhelming misconduct" by Trump also included obstruction of the impeachment inquiry, the committee's report said.
“What do we have here today? What is really interesting over today and for the next few weeks, is America will see why most people don’t go to law school, no offense to our professors,” Collins said in a loud opening statement.
He continued: “unless you’re really good on TV or watching the hearings for the last couple weeks, you couldn’t have possibly actually digested the Adam Schiff report from yesterday or the Republican response in any real way.”
Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School who was the deputy assistant attorney general for voting rights during the Obama administration, was not pleased.
“My review of the evidentiary record, and 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,” she said. “So I am insulted by the suggestion that as a law professor I don’t care about those facts.”
Later she said she had spent all of her Thanksgiving vacation reading the material.
Karlan, the co-founder of the Stanford Law School's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic and former law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, went on to say of the Constitution’s framers, “The very idea that a president might seek the aid of a foreign government in his re-election campaign would have horrified them but based on the evidentiary record that is what President Trump has done.”
from NBC New York - Top Stories https://ift.tt/38aa7L8
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