Fox News’ Legal Expert Says Donald Trump Committed ‘Impeachable Offense’
Fox News’ legal expert Andrew Napolitano said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s contacts with the Ukrainian government constitute an “impeachable offense,” Newsweek reports.
According to Napolitano, Trump “walked into the area of bribery” by pressuring Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter’s allegedly inappropriate business dealings in the European country.
The legal analyst explained during the latest edition of Judge Napolitano’s Chambers why Trump’s actions are an impeachable offense.
“When the president asks a foreign government — the head of a foreign government — to do something to help his campaign, when the president adds a condition to the receipt of foreign funds that Congress didn’t add and when that condition benefits the president’s campaign and not American foreign policy, the president has arguably walked into the area of bribery.”
“And that is an impeachable offense,” he concluded.
Napolitano also explained to his viewers that it is a felony to solicit help from a foreign government or a foreign national in order to “acquire aid” for a political campaign.
Although Trump and his allies have dismissed the scandal as yet another partisan witch hunt perpetrated by the Democratic Party still unwilling to accept the results of the 2016 election, some Republicans have expressed concerns about the allegations.
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah both described the allegations as “troubling.”
Mike Murphy, a prominent Republican operative who used to work for John McCain and Jeb Bush, revealed that a Republican senator had told him that 30 GOP lawmakers would vote to impeach Trump if the vote was held in secret, suggesting that many Republicans in Congress are only backing Trump because they fear electoral backlash.
As Newsweek notes, the transcript of Trump’s conversation with Zelensky suggests that the president was indeed pressuring Ukraine to open an investigation into Hunter Biden. Involved in the scandal is Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has also been accused of lobbying the Ukrainian government to launch a probe into the Bidens.
President Trump: "What these guys are doing, Democrats, are doing to this country is a disgrace and it shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it. Maybe legally through the courts." pic.twitter.com/2vZXszmCz4
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 26, 2019
The whistleblower’s complaint, made available to the public on Thursday, outlines the intelligence official’s concerns about Trump’s conversations with Ukraine.
The president’s dealings with the eastern European country have pushed House Democrats to launch a formal impeachment inquiry.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Trump and his allies have pushed back against the allegations, arguing that there was no quid pro quo, and suggesting that the decision to withdraw military aid to Ukraine has nothing to do with Trump pushing for an investigation into Biden.
