House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) didn’t hold back when asked about his thoughts on the formal response to the Senate summons that President Trump’s legal team issued Saturday evening.
In its response, Trump’s legal team said that the President “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation in both articles of impeachment.”
During an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, Nadler said the White House’s response to both articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — are “arrant nonsense.”
“There is ample evidence, overwhelming evidence,” Nadler said. “Any jury would convict in three minutes flat that the president betrayed his country by breaking the law.”
Nadler then cited the Government Accountability Office’s report last week that said the White House Office of Management and Budget unlawfully withheld military aid to Ukraine.
“The reason he did that was in order to extort a foreign government to smear his political opponent for his personal benefit and to help try to rig the 2020 election as he worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election. Same pattern,” Nadler said. “There’s no question that working with a foreign power, trying to extort a foreign power to interfere in our election, is about as bad as you can imagine.”
Nadler added that the framers of the Constitution put in the impeachment clause because “they were afraid of foreign interference our domestic affairs” and the White House’s argument in its formal response to the Senate summons “that he broke no law is absurd.”
Later in the interview, said that Trump is engaging “in a concerted attempt to deny all evidence.”
“Everyone who testified defied the President testifying. I mean, Mike Pompeo ought to testify. John Bolton ought to testify. What is the president hiding?” Nadler said. “The President says don’t let these people testify. If they were — if they had exculpatory evidence, he’d be saying let them testify.”
Watch Nadler’s remarks below:
.@RepJerryNadler calls White House rebuttal to last night’s trial brief “errant nonsense” pic.twitter.com/dLCFx2hX4y
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) January 19, 2020
