Once respected by conservative Americans for his thoughtful legal analysis, Judge Andrew Napolitano has gone rogue and regularly joins the rest of the mainstream media in bashing President Donald Trump.
In his latest anti-Trump take, Napolitano criticized Trump as “very unwise” for choosing not to participate in Rep. Jerry Nadler’s (D-NY) impeachment hearing Wednesday.
“The rules about which the president is complaining were written by a Republican House of Representatives in 2015. The president would be very unwise not to send lawyers there,” Napolitano said Monday during an appearance on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto.
The Fox News analyst said that Trump cannot complain about due process while refusing an invitation for his lawyers to appear, Mediaite reported. With the impeachment push appearing to falter, though, it’s not clear exactly how Trump comes out losing by refusing to play along.
Napolitano: Trump “unwise” to snub impeachment
After weeks of public impeachment hearings failed to move the public, the process will continue Wednesday with a House Judiciary committee hearing. While Trump has refused to validate Nadler’s “hoax,” Napolitano said that Trump is undermining his complaints about due process by refusing the offer.
Napolitano claimed that Democrats are “not doing anything that the Democrats did not do to Nixon or the Republicans didn’t do to Bill Clinton,” a dubious claim to say the least. “It is a valid vote by the House of Representatives that authorized this. He loses the argument that it’s unfair if he doesn’t take the opportunity to participate himself,” he said.
The vote to authorize the process was passed in a party-line vote in which two Democrats broke ranks. Moreover, the White House argued in a letter that the process is unfair because the witnesses had not yet been named and “it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the President a fair process through additional hearings,” Newsweek reported.
Nadler revealed the witnesses Monday, just two days before the hearing, which will deal with complex legal questions about the constitutional basis for impeachment, rather than the substance of the accusations against Trump. The witnesses are four constitutional scholars, three for the Democrats and one for the Republicans.
Impeachment peaks
Napolitano, a frequent Trump critic these days, affirmed his view that Trump deserves to be impeached for his actions towards Ukraine. Democrats have claimed that Trump bribed Ukraine by conditioning an Oval Office meeting and military support for the country on having investigations opened into Joe Biden and Ukrainian election interference.
“In my view, it is clearly impeachable because it includes two crimes: the crime of bribery…the other crime is asking for campaign aid from a foreign national. That is a crime in and of itself, just asking,” he said.
Who’s really in a tough spot?
While Napolitano made it sound like Trump is taking a risky move, some say it’s the Democrats who appear to be in a tough spot. Polls appear to show support for impeaching Trump peaking around 50%, leading some to speculate whether Democrats will drop impeachment and simply censure Trump instead.
President Trump hailed the fizzling impeachment as a “boon” for Republicans Monday, even as he slammed Democrats for scheduling the hearing for the same day he would be in London for NATO talks. But Democrats have shown no signs of blinking, despite failing to garner bipartisan support. They might be in too deep at this point.
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