President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would turn to the Supreme Court if Democrats decided to pursue impeachment proceedings against him.
“I DID NOTHING WRONG,” the president wrote in a series of tweets posted Wednesday. “If the partisan Dems ever tried to impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
It was not clear how the Supreme Court could legally intervene if Congress moved to impeach Trump. The court ruled unanimously in 1993 that authority over impeachment trials "is reposed in the Senate and nowhere else," according to government records and Politico.
Joshua Matz, a lawyer specializing in constitutional law, told The Washington Post that Trump's tweets reflected "a profound misunderstanding," as the court has "no constitutional warrant to second-guess the substance of an impeachment judgment."
Calls for Trump's impeachment have grown following the release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian election meddling. The special counsel said he found no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to win the 2016 presidential election, though he couldn't rule out the possibility that the president might have obstructed justice.
“The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment,” Mueller said in his report. “At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
The report spelled out 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by Trump.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr said at a news conference that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided after reading Mueller’s report that there was not enough evidence to bring charges against the president.
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