April 2019

Bob Barr: Trump shouldn’t be impeached, but Bill Clinton’s impeachment was justified – Here’s why

FoxNews.com

Some House Democrats who are calling for impeachment proceedings against President Trump on a charge of obstruction of justice claim that President Clinton was impeached in 1998 for far less serious misconduct. As a leader of the Clinton impeachment effort, I disagree.

I still believe the Clinton impeachment was justified. But based on what is now in the public record, I don’t believe a Trump impeachment is warranted.

Clinton, of course, remained in office after the House impeached him on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice because the Senate acquitted him in a trial. Even if the Democratic-controlled House impeached President Trump, he would also likely stay in office after a Senate trial.

Impeachment simply means the House charges the president with serious misconduct it considers to be what the Constitution calls “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The phrase is not defined in the Constitution, and in a sense can mean whatever a simple majority in the House says it means.

However, there are two instances in which sitting presidents have been impeached – Andrew Johnson and Clinton – and one in which President Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached had he not first resigned. Looking at these cases gives us clear guidance that there needs to be a very substantial and substantive basis set forth on the record in order for the impeachment process to have the credibility it merits.

With Democrats in majority control of the House – holding 235 seats, compared to the 197 seats held by Republicans – odds are that the Democrats can impeach Trump if they want to.

Congressional Democrats opposed to President Trump have every right to vote against his legislative proposals, to challenge his actions in office with lawsuits, and to work to defeat him in the November 2020 election. But right now they don’t have grounds to impeach him.

But an impeached president can be removed from office only if 67 members of the 100-member Senate vote to convict him of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Since Democrats (and two independents aligned with them) hold only 47 seats in the Senate, the odds of them getting support from 20 Republican senators to tell Trump “you’re fired” seen insurmountable, based on what we know today.

In 1998, when I served in the House as a Republican representing a district in Georgia, I was one of the leaders of the successful effort to impeach President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.

I’m sure many Democrats would say my motives were purely partisan in the case of Democratic President Clinton, and my views are purely partisan in saying Republican President Trump should not be impeached. But that’s not the case.

For one thing, during my tenure as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990 (appointed to that post by President Reagan), I lead the prosecution of a sitting Republican congressman from Georgia for perjury. That’s right, the same offense for which Democrat Bill Clinton was impeached.

In the month since Attorney General William Barr (no relation to me) released his letter summarizing conclusions of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Russia’s interference in our 2016 presidential election, America has become a nation overflowing with self-proclaimed “experts” on the law of obstruction.

Not even during the height of the Clinton impeachment in December 1998 did the level of debate over what constitutes obstruction of justice reach the level of scrutiny and intensity currently on display across our country.

One important difference between allegations of obstruction against President Clinton and those now leveled against President Trump is paramount.

The case against Clinton was based on extensive and detailed evidence of explicit acts by the then-president, constituting a pattern of activity intended clearly to corruptly influence actual legal proceedings against him then underway.

In stark contrast, the “case” against Trump is based on evidence of disparate actions subject to clearly differing interpretations, but all relating to an allegation – collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to elect Trump – that Mueller determined is not fully and clearly supported by evidence.

As the redacted version of the Mueller report released last week by Barr stated: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government on its election interference activities.”

And of critical importance, there were no court cases taking place for Trump to obstruct. While Mueller and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed charges and obtained guilty pleas and convictions against some Trump associates, the crimes in those cases had nothing to do with election collusion with Russia – the legal focus of Mueller’s investigation.

A quick refresher course in the 1998 impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee is in order to show the differences with the calls today for the impeachment of President Trump.

The impetus of the hearings involving President Clinton was a report submitted to the House in September 1998 by the Office of Independent Counsel headed by former federal judge Ken Starr.

Starr was an independent counsel, operating under a different law (since expired) that gave him more independence from the Justice Department than Mueller had as a special counsel.

Independent Counsel Starr was required by law to submit his report to the House. In contrast, Special Counsel Mueller was required to submit his report to the attorney general. Both men complied with the different laws under which they were appointed.

The report on Clinton set forth in detail “substantial and credible evidence” – the criteria in the independent counsel law – that the then-president had committed 11 impeachable offenses, including instances in which he perjured himself and obstructed justice.

The House Judiciary Committee conducted extensive hearings on the charges against President Clinton, focusing on the federal laws of obstruction, how those laws had been interpreted over the years, and examination of numerous cases in which individuals had been convicted under circumstances similar to those involving Clinton.

The Judiciary Committee then approved a resolution stating that Clinton should be impeached on four articles, including ones alleging perjury and obstruction of justice. This resolution then went to the full House.

The context for the obstruction article of impeachment against President Clinton was a legal proceeding in federal court involving the sexual harassment case brought against Clinton by Paula Jones, in which former White House intern Monica Lewinsky was a witness.

The predicate evidence developed in the Judiciary Committee hearings, which included the detailed material in the Starr report, established clearly that Clinton had lied under oath and had engaged in a deliberate, intentional series of acts designed for one purpose only – to cover up his sexual relationship with Lewinsky and to corruptly influence her testimony against him.

As noted in the “Report of the Committee on the Judiciary” on the impeachment matter (submitted to the full House in December 1998), “although the actions of President Clinton do not have to rise to the level of violating the federal statute regarding obstruction of justice in order to justify impeachment, some if not all of his actions clearly do.”

These actions included, among many other detailed offenses: corruptly attempting to cause a witness against him (Lewinsky) to “execute a sworn affidavit … he knew to be perjurious, false, and misleading.”

The House Judiciary Committee hearings established as well, and also among other offenses, that Clinton “corruptly engaged in … a scheme to conceal evidence that had been subpoenaed in a federal civil rights action brought against him.”

Contrast the extensive record of specific acts by President Clinton to corruptly influence ongoing legal proceedings in federal court (the Paula Jones case and the independent counsel grand jury proceedings), with the obstruction currently alleged to have been committed by President Trump.

All allegations of obstruction leveled at Trump arise from something far less legally substantive than the circumstance under which Clinton was impeached. There is no legal proceeding against Trump in which he has been alleged to have corruptly acted; there is only an investigation (of collusion with Russia) by Mueller that found nothing prosecutable against the current president.

Moreover, there are no civil proceedings targeting President Trump in which he is alleged to have corruptly acted, as existed in the 1998 case against President Clinton.

Clinton did far more than lash out at his tormentors, who included Starr. And Clinton’s actions went far beyond indirectly urging his tormentors to stop mistreating him and those in his administration. These allegations are the essence of the obstruction charges House Democrats now seek to advance against Trump.

I realize all this is complicated and may be hard to follow. But the bottom line is this President Clinton interfered in a judicial proceeding against himself, and President Trump did not. For this reason, Clinton deserved to be impeached but Trump does not.

The Founding Fathers deliberately made the impeachment process very difficult. They did not want impeachment used as a tool to enable Congress to easily remove the president over policy and political disagreements.

Congressional Democrats opposed to President Trump have every right to vote against his legislative proposals, to challenge his actions in office with lawsuits, and to work to defeat him in the November 2020 election. But right now they don’t have grounds to impeach him.

Former Rep. Bob Barr was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia from 1995 to 2003. He is now president of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation.

Major League Baseball’s Agreement With Cuba Deserves Trump’s Approval
The Daily Caller
By Bob Barr

April 22, 2019

The expression “cut off your nose to spite your face” has been in use for centuries.  I’m not sure it translates easily into Spanish, but it reflects accurately what the Trump administration did earlier this month in nixing a pending agreement between Major League Baseball (“MLB”) and its Cuban counterpart (the “FCB”).

The MLB had spent years hashing out an agreement with the FCB that would establish a lawful and workable process by which Cuban ballplayers could be scouted in Cuba by U.S. major league teams, and then signed to gainful contracts.

The proposed deal would have freed Cuban players from having to rely — as they now must — on dealing with smugglers and unscrupulous agents in order to secure passage out of their home country and into the United States in order to participate in “America’s pastime.” This is because under the existing embargo rules governing U.S.-Cuba relations, players in that country cannot negotiate as free agents while still in Cuba.  Thus, these players, including many eagerly sought-after by MLB scouts, have to find surreptitious (and dangerous) ways to leave their island nation; evading the many obstacles placed in their way by the Cuban government.

The Dec. 19 agreement would have solved those problems, and by every reasonable standard would have been a win for players, MLB teams, and baseball fans. Importantly, the MLB made sure the proposed agreement was vetted through the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC).  This is the agency charged with ensuring that no U.S. national security interests are compromised in arrangements between American and foreign entities.

OFAC in fact had given the official green light to the MLC-FCB deal, and everything pointed toward a favorable outcome.  Cuban-born White Sox First Baseman Jose Abreu best summed it up with this statement: “Knowing that the next generation of Cuban baseball players will not endure the unimaginable fate of past Cuban players is the realization of an impossible dream for all of us.  Dealing with the exploitation of smugglers and unscrupulous agencies will finally come to an end for the Cuban baseball player.” His sentiments were echoed by MLB officials and many of the nearly two dozen other Cuban-born players currently on the MLB active roster.

Despite MLB negotiators having successfully dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” in reaching the hard-fought agreement, however, individuals who consider any accommodation with Cuba or Cubans as a moral betrayal, apparently succeeded in convincing the Trump administration to axe the deal.  Florida Senator Marco Rubio labeled the deal “immoral” and “illegal,” notwithstanding that it had been arrived at transparently and in accord with the federal agency charged with ensuring such agreements are legal.
Another Cuban hardliner, Elliott Abrams, a former State Department official now serving as Trump’s Special Representative for Venezuela, publicly slammed the deal in an opinion piece shortly after it was announced. In perhaps the strangest argument against the MLB-FCB agreement, National Security Adviser John Bolton reportedly concluded it should be nixed because it would benefit Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, even though it had no direct or indirect relationship with or impact in that country.

Despite the fact that OFAC expressly determined that the Cuban Baseball Federation is not an arm of the Cuban government, these hardliners continue to beat the drum that the Havana regime would improperly benefit financially from the agreement, simply because the CFB would receive a percentage fee from any contract signed by a Cuban player with a major league team in the U.S.  (Such fee arrangements are identical to those in similar agreements between the MLB and its counterparts in Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan.)

With overall attendance at MLB games slumping (dropping last year below 70 million for the first time in over 15 years) — caused partly by witnessing “some really bad baseball,” in the view of sportswriter Maury Brown — bringing in a group of young, exciting players from Cuba could provide a much-needed shot in the arm for the franchises (including for the Miami Marlins, whose attendance drop has been among the most pronounced).
More broadly, it is worth noting there already are numerous U.S. business interests that benefit from government-sanctioned economic arrangements with Cuba; including airlines, cruise lines, travel agencies and money-wiring services. Denying such benefit to individual Cuban baseball players and their families, and to the MLB teams for which they seek to play, based on misplaced notions of morality or national security, is indefensible on any legitimate grounds.  The decision nixing the MLB-FCB agreement needs to be reversed.

Bob Barr (@BobBarr<http://www.twitter.com/BobBarr>) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003.

The Real Problem With Immigration Policy? Judges
The Daily Caller
Bob Barr

If you were to guess the most critical problem faced by President Trump in dealing with the flood of illegal immigration at our southern border, what would it be? Foreign government-sponsored migration caravans? Funding for the border wall? A shortage of border patrol agents? Indeed, these all are aspects of the serious problems Trump is encountering in addressing the ongoing crisis at out southern border; but they fail to get to the heart of the problem the president faces in taking steps to solve the crisis.

In a word, judges are the main obstacle standing between the president and his ability to seriously address the border crisis. Federal judges.

Interestingly, our founding fathers warned of this very problem more than two centuries ago. “At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1823. “Experience however soon shewed in what way they were to become the most dangerous.”

Jefferson’s comments reflect what many of our founders feared; that while the the powers of the republic were vested in three co-ordinate (not “co-equal”) branches, each acting as a check on the others, the furtive creep of judicial power over the years would lead to an imbalance in power, inviting a tyranny of the judiciary. This is exactly where we find ourselves today, 230 years after the Constitution was ratified.

Article III of the Constitution outlines specific and limited responsibilities for the federal judiciary; but it was not until the 1803 Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison, that the concept of judicial review of the nation’s laws took hold. Judicial review is an entirely appropriate and essential function of the Courts, but it was not intended – and in fact was feared – that such powers might eventually grow so that every decision or move by the president or Congress be reviewed and possibly vetoed by unelected judges.

This is exactly what is happening in the quagmire that has become illegal immigration flooding our southern border, wherein every policy decision by Trump to stem or slow the tide is subject to the whims of some liberal judge on a federal bench, armed and ready with national injunctions to thwart his every move. While the administration is able to appeal these decisions, such remedy consumes many weeks if not months; during which time appropriated funds lie fallow and federal workers are stymied in their ability to implement policy directives from the White House. Just this week, a judge from the 9th Circuit in California issued a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers.
Truly, we have reached the point at which unelected judges are making public policy; often in direct and pointed opposition to the platform and policies on which the president was elected.

A lesson drawn from America’s seventh president – Andrew Jackson – might now be timely. It was in 1832 that Jackson, furious at a ruling by the Supreme Court, declared that “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

Nearly two centuries after Jackson threw down the gauntlet to the high court, the federal judiciary has grown in power far beyond anything the earlier president could have imagined. In no public policy sphere is this imbalance more apparent than immigration.

Federal judges now are routinely interjecting themselves into virtually every aspect of immigration policy, including those having nothing to do with genuine questions of constitutionality which John Marshall properly identified as legitimate aspects of judicial review.

Fueled not only by the judiciary branch’s long-standing lust for power, but now by the left’s hatred for Donald Trump, judicial public policy activism has morphed into a multi-headed hydra that threatens to engulf both the legislative and executive branches of our government; making it next to impossible for either of these branches of government to chart meaningful long-term public policies.

While the lion’s share of attention devoted to this growing problem is focused on the nine justices of the Supreme Court, and to a lesser but still measurable degree on the 179 federal appellate judges, it is life-tenured district court judges who are increasingly – often brazenly – challenging the president’s policy moves.  Recognizing the potency of enlisting the awesome power of judicial orders to deny Trump the ability to govern in this arena, the left readily is enlisting liberal state attorneys general as foot soldiers to file multiple injunctions with sympathetic federal trial court judges, designed solely to stop the administration from fully or even partially implementing measures to stem the tide of illegal immigration at the southern border.

It very well may be time for President Trump to take a cue from his predecessor in that office; the one whose portrait currently adorns the wall of the Oval Office – Andrew Jackson.

Bob Barr (@BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation.