As of Friday, all but three Senate Republicans — Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine — had signed onto a resolution that accused Democrats of conducting an unfair inquiry and called on the House to vote for a formal impeachment investigation.
A federal judge granted a request by the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York , to see secret grand jury evidence from the Mueller investigation. Credit... WASHINGTON — A federal judge handed a victory to House Democrats on Friday when she ruled that they were legally engaged in an impeachment inquiry, ...
Mr. Brechbuhl is a close ally of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and it is unclear whether he will follow the White House directive or defy it to join other State Department officials who testified before impeachment investigators.
In July, they filed a petition asking Judge Howell to order the Justice Department to provide that information under the Watergate precedent. In its legal filings, the House Judiciary Committee asserted that it was already conducting an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump should be impeached.
After Mr. Mueller completed his report about the Russia investigation and Mr. Trump’s efforts as president to obstruct it, Attorney General William P. Barr turned over most of the report to Congress. But he censored portions that contained material that is secret under grand-jury rules.
Democrats have countered that no resolution is required under the Constitution or House rules and pointed out that impeachment efforts to remove other officials, like judges, started without such a vote.
Though the impeachment inquiry has broadened to focus on investigating the Ukraine scandal that erupted last month, the dispute before Judge Howell arose from an earlier stage: the aftermath of the Mueller investigation.
A UNC professor and the author of The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis and Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know, Gerhardt told Slate that the president has “dismissed the rule of law as being relevant to his life.” He has argued that “those articles of impeachment that had been approved against Richard Nixon turn out to be relevant, as well, to the misconduct of President Trump. First, he has obstructed justice a variety of different ways. Second, he has asked the president of a foreign country — actually asked the presidents of a few different countries — to intervene in the next election on his behalf. And then third, he has refused to comply with more subpoenas than most people can count.”
While the previous witnesses were called by the Democratic leadership of the House Judiciary, Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, is the only constitutional scholar to be called by the Republican minority on the committee. Turley also testified in the Clinton impeachment, claiming that the allegations of perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of office were “clear and compelling grounds” for impeachment if the House could prove them.
A Harvard Law professor specializing in constitutional studies, Feldman advised the Iraqi Governing Council on its interim constitution in 2003. A columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, he has argued that Democrats should avoid legalism in their impeachment arguments — which would “consist of the idea that Trump’s conduct can best be condemned by identifying a specific legal rule and showing that he violated it” — and wrote a piece called “Trump’s Quid Pro Quo Is Unconstitutional.”