Trump’s Expansive Claims of Executive Privilege Pose “Very Serious Const...

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Trump’s Expansive Claims of Executive Privilege Pose “Very Serious Constitutional Crisis”

Jan 28, 2020

Democracy Now!

During eight hours of oral arguments at the president’s impeachment trial on Monday, President Trump’s legal team repeatedly said that he has done nothing wrong, and largely ignored the explosive revelations made by Trump’s former national security adviser. The president’s case was made on Monday by a team of lawyers including Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, whose probe led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. In an upcoming book, former national security adviser John Bolton says Trump told him the withholding of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine was linked to his push for investigations into his political rivals, including Joe Biden. The withholding of congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine is at the center of the impeachment trial. On Monday, Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah said the Bolton revelations underscore their case for allowing witnesses in the impeachment trial.

For more, we speak with Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law and philosophy, and the faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “This is a moment of very serious constitutional crisis for our democracy,” she says, “because we have a Senate that is unable to act to remove the president because they are unable to push back on the president’s own obstruction of the process involved in impeachment.”