Worse misconduct of any prior president....

Impeachment witness calls Trump’s actions ‘worse than the misconduct of any prior president’

Several constitutional scholars are testifying in the Judiciary Committee's first impeachment hearing.

By KYLE CHENEY and ANDREW DESIDERIO

Three constitutional lawyers called by Democrats in their rapidly progressing impeachment inquiry plan to testify that Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine were the worst examples of misconduct in presidential history and the reason the framers included impeachment in the Constitution.

“The president’s serious misconduct, including bribery, soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader in exchange for his exercise of power, and obstructing justice and Congress are worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor will say, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by POLITICO.

Gerhardt, along with Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman and Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan, will argue that Trump's conduct far exceeds the bar set in the Constitution — high crimes and misdemeanors — to warrant impeachment and removal from office.

The lone GOP witness, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, however, will argue that impeaching Trump over the Ukraine allegations would be a historic mistake.

“If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president,” Turley plans to say. He also calls the House's impeachment process too rushed.

Democrats will lean on the testimony of their witnesses as they assert that their case that Trump abused his power is “overwhelming” and “indisputable.” The testimony marks the beginning of the House Judiciary Committee's drive to turn a mountain of evidence unearthed by congressional investigators into a constitutional case for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.

The panel’s first impeachment hearing comes a day after House Democrats released a scathing 300-page report accusing Trump of pressuring Ukraine — a nation dependent on U.S. support for its war against Russia — to investigate his Democratic adversaries. They also allege that the president obstructed their investigation and intimidated witnesses along the way.

Wednesday’s hearing marks the formal hand-off from the Intelligence Committee, which led the Ukraine probe, to the Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with shepherding the impeachment process to the House floor. The panel of constitutional law scholars, Democrats say, will apply the facts of the Ukraine investigation to the standards for impeachment set out in the Constitution.

The hearing is the first in a series that is likely to result in the Judiciary Committee drafting articles of impeachment, which Democrats are aiming to vote on before Christmas — though a formal timetable is still being hashed out among senior Democratic leaders.

Democrats plan to present a united front on Wednesday against Republican attacks on the case they have built against the president, which Trump’s allies say has been an unfair and illegitimate impeachment process.

Democrats plan to use the hearing to “examine the constitutional framework that is put in place to address presidential misconduct” and “apply the constitutional law to the facts” uncovered by the Intelligence Committee, according to a staffer working on the impeachment inquiry.

Like the Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, Wednesday’s hearing will feature lengthy questioning rounds by committee lawyers, a format that aided Democrats during the evidence-gathering phase. Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) plans to lean on Norm Eisen, a longtime Washington attorney who joined the committee as a consultant earlier this year, for that portion of the hearing.

That format may also help minimize some of the partisan broadsides expected to arise in later rounds of questioning, when lawmakers take their traditional five minutes apiece to question witnesses. Though the five-minute rounds tend to expose partisan fissures in these high-profile hearings, they are slated to occur hours after the start, which could limit their impact.

Democrats' witnesses will emphasize that there's enough evidence to impeach Trump simply in the transcript of his July 25 phone call with Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump requested that he investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. That call alone, says Feldman, is an abuse of Trump's power.

"This act on its own qualifies as an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor," Feldman intends to say.

Turley plans to argue that impeaching Trump solely for an "abuse of power" would break from the House's previous two impeachments that also alleged criminal conduct by the president.

"Abuses of power tend to be even less defined and more debatable as a basis for impeachment than some of the crimes already mentioned. Again, while a crime is not required to impeach, clarity is necessary," he plans to say. "In this case, there needs to be clear and unequivocal proof of a quid pro quo. That is why I have been critical of how this impeachment has unfolded."

GOP lawmakers had previously pleaded with Democrats to expand the witness list and balance the number of witnesses called by members on both sides of the aisle. But Democrats stuck with a traditional hearing format.

Republicans intend to highlight procedural disparities that give the Democratic majority the advantage and to claim Democrats have led an unfair process from the start. The Judiciary panel features some of Trump’s most vocal and aggressive allies, contributing to expectations of a confrontational hearing in which Democrats may be forced to fend off a tsunami of GOP attacks.

Anticipating the onslaught, Democrats are signaling that they intend to begin the hearing with an appeal to honor the seriousness of the moment. Impeachment, they say, is a weighty and historic process and should be handled with the gravity it deserves rather than with partisan antics. Any effort by Republicans to gum up the works, in that context, could backfire, they say.

In additional to their procedural complaints, Republicans intend to press a case that Democrats’ evidence failed to show anything remotely close to justifying Trump’s removal from office. A report prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee characterized Democrats’ probe as a political exercise intended to damage Trump based on “hearsay” and “emotion” rather than facts.

Trump opted against sending a White House representative to Wednesday’s hearing, despite the House-approved option to allow a lawyer for the president to participate in the hearing and join in the questioning of witnesses. However, Trump has not ruled out sending a lawyer to future hearings held by the committee.