Republicans hes cautioned against beach meant and of course at the heart of all this youre recall is the democrats that the case for the democrats is the allegation that president try to leverage a white house meeting and military aid which was sought by ukraine to pressure the ukrainian president vladimir selenski to nongenetic ations a former Vice President joe biden any son hunter by the so happening right now in the House Judiciary Committee 45 minute question period for the republicans and the republicans so far interesting only focusing on their witness Jonathan Turley professor of law Washington University lets continue to listen you have to understand the most the senators when when it was said. They jumped into their political graves it was true most of their political careers ended they knew they would and because of the animosity of the period triangle said the following once this set the example of an peaching a president for what when the excitement of the hour shall have subsided will be regarded its insufficient causes no future president will be safe who happens to differ from the majority of the house. And 2 thirds of the senate he said i tremble for the future of my country i cannot be an instrument to produce such a result and at the hazard of the ties even a friendship and affection till calmer times shall do justice to my motives no alternatives are left to me and he proceeded to give the vote that ended his career you cant wait for a calmer time its time for you is now and i would say that what troubles said is has even more bearing today because i believe that this is much like the johnson impeachment its manufactured intil you build a record im not saying you cant build a record but you cant do it like this and you cant impeach a president like this professor turley theres a recent book on impeachment by a harvard law professor lawrence tribe in joshua mats that discusses what they consider to be a legitimate appeal to impeachment process. The book is pretty anti trump its called to end a presidency and in that book the authors state the following when an impeachment is purely partisan or appears that way is presumptively illegitimate when only republicans or only democrats view the president s conduct as justifying removal theres a strong risk that policy disagreements or partisan animists have overtaken the proper measure of congressional impartiality. Another quote is we can also expect that opposition leaders to the president will be pushed to impeach and will suffer internal blowback if they dont the key question is whether they will cave to this pressure one risk of our broken politics is that the house will undertake additional doomed partisan impeachments a development that would be disastrous for the nation as a whole mess or ter turley is that advice being followed by House Democrats in this case not on this schedule the one thing if you look at i laid out the 3 impeachments the one thing that comes out of those impeachments in terms of what bipartisan support occurred is that impeachment require a certain period of saturation and maturation that is the public has to catch up im not prejudging what your record would show but if you rush this impeachment youre going to leave half the country behind and certainly thats not what the president what the framers wanted you have to give it time to build a record this isnt an impulse buy item youre trying to remove a duly elected president the United States and that takes time it takes work but at the end if you look at nixon which was the Gold Standard in this respect the public did catch up they originally did not support impeachment but they changed their mind you change their mind and so did by the way the courts because you allowed these issues to be heard in the courts professor turley the next and clinton impeachment were debated solidly in the high crimes category correct crimes where it is you but on the evidence presented so far is it your view that there is no credible evidence that any crime was committed by president wrong. Yes ive gone through all of the crimes mentioned they do not meet any reasonable interpretation of those crimes and im relying on express statements from the federal courts i understand that the language in the statutes are often broad thats not the controlling language its the language of the interpretation of federal courts and i think that all of those decisions stand mightily in the way of these theories and if you cant make out those crimes and dont call it that crime if it doesnt matter then whats the point call it treason call it endangered species violations have none of this matters so that would put the democrats move to impeach President Trump in the category of high misdemeanors and in James Madisons notes of the Constitutional Convention debates they clearly show that the term hi mr manner was explicitly explicitly referred to as a technical term and it wasnt just something that any majority of partisan members might happen to think it was at any given time and often when theres a debate about a technical term people turn to dictionaries and the 1st truly comprehensive English Dictionary was Samuel Johnsons a dictionary of the english language it was 1st published in 755 and the founders in many of their libraries had this book and on their desks in the Supreme Court still cites johnsons dictionary to determine the original public understanding of the words used in the constitution so heres how the 75 edition of johnsons dictionary defines the relevant terms and highness demeanor hi the relevant definition is capital great opposed to little as high treason definition of misdemeanor is defined as something less than an atrocious crime. And atrocious is defined as wicked in a high degree enormous or at least criminal so if you look at how these words were defined during the time the constitution was debated and ratified misdemeanor is something less than an atrocious crime and atrocious is wicked in a high degree and as a result a high mist of misdemeanor must be Something Like just less than a crime its wicked in a high degree now professor turley is that generally comport with your understanding of the phrase high misdemeanors it was understood by the founders with the purpose of narrowing that phrase to prevent the sorts of abuses that youve described it did i mean if you compares the extradition clause the language was that was used was different for a reason they did not want to have to establish a type of broad meeting according to the view of some people as to the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors those provisions would be essentially identical and thats clearly not what they wanted a professor turley next id like to explore how this impeachment is based on no crime and no request for false information unlike the nixon a clinton impeachment like to start with some background the American Media for years has been asking questions about former Vice President bidens son and his paid involvement with a corrupt Ukrainian Energy company bryza is one example of those media reports d from june 2021008 was an a. B. C. News investigation titled 100 bidens ford foreign deals to joe bidens son profit off fathers position as Vice President theres still a clip of it here from a with a barisan a promotional video and many have seen the video of joe biden talking about getting the ukrainian prosecutor who is investigating grissom a fired. And a New York Times article says from made 1st 2019 referring to joseph r. Biden one of his most memorable performances came on a trip to kiev in march 2016 when he threatened to withhold a 1000000000. 00 in United States loan guarantees if ukraine as leaders did not dismiss the countrys top prosecutor among those who had a stake in the outcome was hunter biden mr bines younger son who at the time was on the board of an Energy Company owned by a ukrainian all of arc would been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general we would have 100 biden engaged in no crimes regarding a sitting on the board of or is my if an investigation led to the bankruptcy of the corrupt company Hunter Bidens lucrative position on the bridge and the board would have been eliminated along with his 50000. 00 a month payments that was his stake in a potential prosecution involving the company in fact even neil kakuro the former acting solicitor general under president obama in his recent book entitled impeach says the following is what contra biden did wrong absolutely under biden had no real experience in the Energy Sector which made him wholly unqualified to sit on the board of the only logical reason the company could have had for appointing him with his ties to Vice President biden this kind of neat ism isnt only wrong it is a potential danger to our country since it makes it easier for foreign powers to buy influence no politician from either party should allow a foreign power to conduct this kind of influence peddling with their family members also Lieutenant Colonel bynum and was asked at his hearing would it ever be u. S. Foreign policy in your experience to ask a foreign leader to open a political investigation and he replied certainly the president is well within his right to do that so the American Media and others were asking questions about honor biden and his involvement in the ukraine and President Trump in his call with the ukrainian president simply asked the same questions the media was asking. Now professor turley is your understanding that the house impeach nixon for helping cover up his administrations involvement in a crime and that the evidentiary record showed nixon knew of criminal acts and sought to conceal them including tape recordings of president nixon ordering a cover up of the watergate break in shortly after it occurred it is in is it also your understanding that the house impeach clinton for the clock crime of lying under oath to deny a woman suing him for Sexual Harassment evidence she was legally entitled to as correct. So there were requests for false information in both the nixon and clinton scandals by the president s aides or associates or by the president himself directly yes but there are no words in the 4 corners of the transcript of President Trumps call that should or request for a false information are there no and thats the thats one of the reasons why if you want to establish the opposing view you have to investigate this further now let me walk through the standard of evidence House Democrats insisted upon during the clinton impeachment the minority views in the clinton impeachment report were signed by among others grand Senate Minority leader schumer and current House Judiciary Committee chairman adler and they say that one of the professors who testified quote has meticulously documented how in the nixon inquiry everyone agreed the majority of the minority in the president s counsel that the standard of proof for the committee in the house was clear and convincing evidence professor turley would you agree that the evidence compiled to date by House Democrats during these current impeachment proceedings fails to meet the standard of clear and convincing evidence i do by a considerable measure now let me turn again to the book and the presidency and that book the authors state the following quote except in the most extraordinary circumstances impeaching with a partial or plausibly contested understanding of key facts is a bad idea. Professor turley do you think that impeaching in this case would constitute impeaching with a partial or plausibly contested understanding of key facts i think that thats clear because the this is one of the thinnest records ever to go forward on impeachment i mean the johnson record once again we can debate because this that was the 4th attempt at an impeachment but this is certainly the thinnest of a modern record if you take a look at the size of the record of clinton and nixon they were massive in comparison to this which was almost wafer thin in comparison and it has left doubts not just in 2000 the minds of people supporting President Trump whats in the minds of people like myself about what actually occurred theres a difference between requesting investigations and a quid pro quo you need to stick the landing on the quid pro quo you need to get the evidence to support it it might be out there i dont know but its not in this record i agree with my colleagues weve all read the record and i just come to a different conclusion i dont see proof of a quid pro quo no matter what my presumptions assumptions or bias might be on that point id like to turn now to the current impeachment procedures professor turley would you agree that a full and fair adversary system in which each side gets to present its own evidence and witnesses is essential to the search for truth it is and the interesting thing is on the ng with the english impeachment model that was rejected by the framers they took the language but they actually rejected the model of the impeachment from england particularly terms of hastings but even in england it was a robust adversarial process if you and if you want to see adversarial work take a look at what edmund burke did so Warren Hastings mean he was on him like ugly on moose for the entire tire trial. And as you know in the many minority views in the clinton impeachment report the House Democrats wrote the following we believe it is incumbent upon the committee to provide these basic protections as representative Barbara Jordan observed during the watergate inquiry impeachment not only mandates due process but due process quadrupled. The same minority views also support the right to crossexamination in a variety of contexts and the clinton example. Now professor turley you describe how Monica Lewinsky wasnt allowed to be called as a witness in the Senate Impeachment trial after her original testimony going to be old how she had been told to lie about her relationship with president clinton by his Close Associates its a cautionary tale about the dangers of denying key witnesses can you elaborate on that because the only reason i mention that is that i was in a portion of my testimony dealing with how you structure these impeachments what happened during the clinton pietschmann and it came up during the hearing that we had previously. Was a question of how much the house had to do in terms of clinton pietschmann because we had this robust record created by the independent counsel and they had a lot of testimony videotapes etc so the house basically incorporated that and the assumption was that those witnesses would be called at the senate but there was a failure at the senate the rules that were it were applied in my view were not fair they restricted witnesses to only 3 and thats why i brought up the lewinsky matter about a year ago Monica Lewinsky revealed that she had been told that if she signed that affidavit that we now know is untrue they had this she would not be called as a witness if you had to actually called live witnesses that type of information would have been part of the record mr my yoga gentlemen you know this back i note this is the moment in which the white house would have had not be true to question the witnesses but they declined our invitation so we will now proceed. To questions under the 5 minute rule i yield myself 5 minutes for the purpose of questioning the witnesses. Fesa feldman would you respond to professor turley comments about bribery especially about the. Relevance of the elements of criminal bribery yes bribery had a clear meaning we have been listening to the republicans present question then witness the then all experts. And now its professor noah feldman who is speaking once again at the inquiry which is now in the House Judiciary Committee which has heard from for. The fesses have talked about why they think the case for impeachment should go on all should not go on lets bring in heidi is your castle who is on capitol hill for us in washington d. C. Heidi again this is a new phase in the inquiry into present donald trump remind our viewers of whats been happening over the last 3 hours. Sure so today was the 1st day that the House Judiciary Committee has had control of this impeachment inquiry why is that such a big deal well because this is the committee that is charged to initiate impeachment proceedings those actual articles of impeachment which is really synonymous to a criminal and a criminal indictment in a sense that the president would face eventually if he goes to a trial before the senate and setting up the the writing of those articles today was the findings of the actual trumps dealings with you frame that we heard developed over weeks of testimony from the fact witnesses making the case according to democrats that trump put his personal interests ahead of those of National Security when he pressured ukraine to announce that it was investigating his political rival joe biden while trump was withholding security aid to ukraine now the question today isnt so much whether that happened isnt what charges trump may face but rather whether those accusations rise to the level of impeachable offenses and from these 4 witnesses who were all legal constitutional scholars 3 who were in the majority had a unanimous answer to yes this is. Is impeachable