Trump's lawyers are claiming that “abuse of power” isn't actually an impeachable offense—but in 2018, Trump's own attorney general had a much different take
that in a memo written in the summer of 2018 when he was still a private attorney, now-U.S. Attorney Generalargued the exact opposite of what the Trump team is now claiming in their defense of the president. In the
, which discredits the Mueller probe and argues that Trump should not talk to then-special prosecutor, Barr argues that the president is shielded from criminal penalties and should not be held accountable by a special prosecutor. Instead, the president is held responsible by Congress and their impeachment powers—not just for criminal charges, but for “any abuses of discretion.
Barr's argument that Congress has the constitutional right to impeach the president for abuse of power was politically helpful for Trump at the time, but also stands in line with mainstream legal thinking. Constitutional scholars have the Trump team's argument against the abuse of power charge, which University of Missouri law professordecried as “constitutional nonsense.” “The almost universal consensus—in Great Britain, in the colonies, in the American states between 1776 and 1787, at the Constitutional Convention and since—has been that criminal conduct is not required for impeachment,” Bowman, whose writings on impeachment Trump's lawyers cited in their memo, told the.
The about-face on abuse of power is likely just the beginning of the Trump legal team's hypocritical approach to defending the president, as the Senate trial Tuesday suggested that the Trump defense is more concerned with what's politically expedient to say in the moment than what's been argued in the past.
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