Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr knows something about impeachment, as he was a manager in the Senate trial for Bill Clinton, who was impeached by the U.S. House but not convicted in the U.S. Senate.
And he says President Trump is “not impeachable.”
“I worked on the Clinton impeachment – and Trump is not impeachable,” his commentary published in the Daily Caller was headlined.
He said that after a review of the details of President Trump’s Ukraine telephone call, for which Democrats are demanding immediate impeachment, “It is clear that no federal laws were broken and nothing close to an impeachable offense took place.”
Barr said the call transcript shows President Trump was doing exactly what he should have been doing.
“In the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump emphasized that his administration was serious about getting to the bottom of corruption in Ukraine that had affected and had been affected by the United States. Our president made clear he was referring to evidence that Ukrainian interests had been involved corruptly in our 2016 election, and that a high government official in our country — former Vice President Joe Biden — had improperly interfered with that country’s effort to discover and prosecute corrupt acts,” he wrote.
Barr said the fact that “one focus of Trump’s demands that Ukraine clean up its act as a prerequisite to continued support from America might also involve an individual now seeking to challenge Trump for the presidency, does not in any way diminish or undercut the propriety of Trump’s insistence that the Ukrainian president take steps to get to the bottom of what corruption already had occurred involving the two countries; and also to ensure that going forward the same corrupt acts would not recur.”
He said that to claim it was a crime for Trump to want Ukraine “investigate past corrupt acts involving the United States, and that the country stop doing so moving forward, simply because Joe Biden now has chosen to challenge Trump politically next year, undercuts the very power of a president to protect our country from foreign interference and to investigate corrupt acts by former U.S. officials.”
“Biden is deserving of no such self-imposed immunity,” he said.
Barr called it a “warped view” that upends “our system of criminal justice.”
It’s “the executive branch (headed by the president) that investigates and prosecutes violations of federal law,” he argued.
“It was clear in that July 25 call that President Trump was letting President Zelensky know that our attorney general — the head of our Department of Justice that is responsible for such investigations — would be doing just that. To now assert that for this President Trump should be removed from office and prosecuted criminally, is absurd.”
“Equally inapplicable and unsupported” are other claims about bribery, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and more, he wrote.
His conclusion?
“Trump was acting responsibly and presidential. He deserves our appreciation, not our opprobrium.”
