the way, elise stefanik, who is now saying, yeah, who cares about the rule of law, i m just going to make up stuff, and the rule of law doesn t matter, she s a harvard grad. so i ve got a news flash for everybody out there. harvard is failing in brainwashing all of their students into a progressive mindset. because half the tools are running around washington right now, whether it s cruz or holly or stefanik or this guy that was in court today are harvard educated. or yale. harvard or yale. so, i mean, it really kind of blows up this theory that there is some kind of like vast conspiracy to have all the ivy league schools turn out woke robots. and it s on its face, knowing what impeachment is like, knowing what the process is, it s a political process. it s not a court of law. anybody who thinks impeachment must be necessary to enforce
yes if he s impeached and convicted first. my question was, so he s not impeached or convicted, we ll put that aside. you re saying a president could sell pardons, could sell military secrets, could order seal team six to assassinate a political rival. okay, so the argument, the argument that trump s lawyer came back to time and time again, is that the only way that you could, under the constitution, prosecute a hypothetical president for doing all those hypothetical crimes, would be if first, while he was president, he was impeached and convicted by a two thirds vote in the senate. there are a bunch of reasons why that is ludicrous, not the least of which is that when the ex president was being impeached the second time, one of the arguments made for acquittal was that impeachment was not the right venue. mitch mcconnell argued at length it was not the senate s
thing, in one venue the argument is like, this is the venue. and the other venue, it s not the venue now. here s trump s lawyer, during impeachment, assuring the senators, look, if if you go get a vote to convict, he can of course go get arrested and convicted. take a listen. if my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think the president trump committed a criminal offense, let s understand, a high crime is a felony and misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. the words haven t changed that much overtime. after he s out of office, you go and arrest him. i m there s no such thing as a january exception to impeachment. there is only the text of the constitution, which makes very clear that a former president is subject to criminal sanction after his presidency for any illegal acts he commits. that s donald trump s lawyer at the impeachment hearing making literally the opposite
argument that his lawyer made today before these judges. yes. and one of the reasons it s also specious is because this impeachment judgment clause doesn t just apply to presidents. it applies to anyone who could be impeached by the house and senate. former federal judges, four cabinet secretaries, some of those people have been prosecuted without impeachment. hello henry cisneros, the former hud secretary. there are a litany of federal judges who ve been prosecuted and convicted, either without impeachment or before they re impeached. so trump s lawyers had to have known that during the impeachment debacle that you just showed there. they understand full well that the impeachment judgment clause isn t just about the president, and those real life examples show why it can t possibly be victorious here. i thought, when the impeachment thing showed up in the brief, so in their brief they had this, again, a little light taking a shot from 36 feet. if you hit it, great, but
you ve got to try. so they had this thing like, it s double jeopardy because he was already impeached impeached and wasn t convicted, so criminal trial. that has fallen by the wayside. they re-fashioned it. my feeling was, are they trying to come up with something novel enough that scotus will take it? it s out of nowhere. this entire ordeal around impeachment, this entire question, this entire appeal, is the shot from 36 feet. it s the half court shot. if it goes in at any point for any reason, you take it. and i think the more that you can jam-packed into, that you may get a line, it may be referred to as what we called dictate of an opinion, we try to ride. the dictate is something a judge may say that is not necessarily jermaine to the case, but is part of a decision. they re looking for something that they can hang their hat on, some to work, some avenue, some cracked they re going to be able to open that s controversial enough that they feel like it s going to generate a legiti