Bob Barr, Who Served as Impeachment Manager for Clinton's Trial, Speaks Out on Whether Trump is Impeachable

Bob Barr knows a thing or two about impeachment.

The former Georgia representative and federal prosecutor served as impeachment manager in the Senate trial of Bill “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” Clinton.

In an editorial for The Daily Caller, Bob lays it out: The facts as we know them regarding Trump’s July 25th phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky simply don’t add up to impeachment.

No federal laws were broken, he explains. The President didn’t even get near an impeachable offense.

In fact, in Bob’s view, Trump was doing exactly what he should — telling Ukraine the White House was geting serious about corruption:

Our president made clear he was referring to evidence that Ukrainian interests had been involved corruptly in our 2016 election, and that a high government official in our country — former Vice President Joe Biden — had improperly interfered with that country’s effort to discover and prosecute corrupt acts.

Of course, not everyone feels the same — perhaps not entirely coincidentally, a lot of those are Democrats.

But Bob particularly addresses Libertarian Andrew Napolitano’s claim that the call’s transcript incriminates the President in terms of both federal violation and impeachable offense.

Indeed, Andrew believes Trump’s actions are a bullseye:

Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said Trump’s “Civil War” tweet is “a dog whistle to the deranged.” Also calls Trump’s actions “criminal and impeachable”.

Trump loses Fox News, then approval rating sinks immediately and impeachment steps up. https://t.co/pdhPuq0uWj

— 𝙰𝚗𝚊𝚋𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚎 (@DemocracyJourno) October 3, 2019

.@FoxNews’ Andrew Napolitano on again saying impeachment was designed specifically for Trump. pic.twitter.com/En87q7sHXf

— Arizona Political 💎 (@AZVotes) October 1, 2019

But Bob says Biden ‘s involvement is incidental, and it doesn’t rightfully prevent Trump from taking care of business:

The fact that one focus of Trump’s demands that Ukraine clean up its act as a prerequisite to continued support from America might also involve an individual now seeking to challenge Trump for the presidency, does not in any way diminish or undercut the propriety of Trump’s insistence that the Ukrainian president take steps to get to the bottom of what corruption already had occurred involving the two countries; and also to ensure that going forward the same corrupt acts would not recur.

To claim, as many have done — including Napolitano — that it is a crime for Trump to insist that Ukraine investigate past corrupt acts involving the United States, and that the country stop doing so moving forward, simply because Joe Biden now has chosen to challenge Trump politically next year, undercuts the very power of a president to protect our country from foreign interference and to investigate corrupt acts by former U.S. officials. Biden is deserving of no such self-imposed immunity.

Interesting point.

The former congressman labels the call for impeachment “absurd.”

It certainly does, in my view, look to be far from advantageous for Democrats. But they’re in the soup now.

Trump’s adversaries have talked so big that it appears detrimental to turn back now. At the same time, though, they’re killing Biden as a candidate in the process.

What’s better — to come up with a way for you to win, or to obsess over making your opponent lose? Dems have gone with the latter, and they’re only serving up another GOP victory and 4 more years of writhing in electoral agony.

If they hate Trump so much, it seems they should’ve been turning over every rock in America in order to come up with a superior offering for 2020. Concurrently, they could’ve given the country positive legislative changes to bolster their claim of superiority.

Instead, it’s been years of firing arrows at The Donald.

But he’s hard to hit…because he has moves: