At Wednesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing on impeachment, the witness called by Republicans, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, gave a disingenuous, hackish performance.
Turley criticized the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump as overly partisan, a concern that didn’t seem to trouble him in 1998, when he supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He argued that Democrats shouldn’t accuse Trump of bribery for his Ukraine shakedown unless it meets the statutory definition, even though a 2014 Washington Post op-ed essay by one Jonathan Turley made clear that criminal statutes aren’t controlling in the impeachment process.
“While there’s a high bar for what constitutes grounds for impeachment, an offense does not have to be indictable,” he wrote then, when he was discussing whether there were grounds for impeaching Barack Obama.