Turley's testimony is *beyond belief*. He conceded that in-kind benefits can be the subject of a bribery case, but *erased* from the bribery statute the solicitation clause of the statute, saying *all bribes must be completed to be charged*. False, and I can't believe he said it.
1/ Turley is doing what attorneys do when they're misbehaving: talk a lot about the "record" without ever discussing it in detail. When he's talking about Obama or other Democrats, he gets *very* specific about the facts. When he discusses Trump, it's just "the record." Risible.
2/ Jonathan Turley's strength has always been that he sounds eminently *reasonable*. The best *bad* attorneys are those who manage to make bad legal analysis and a poor knowledge of the record sound fantastically well-qualified.
Kudos to him for that, but nothing else, sadly.
Kudos to him for that, but nothing else, sadly.
3/ Turley was a proponent—in THE HILL—of the Kremlin's "Ukrainian collusion" conspiracy theory, and during Obama's administration strongly implied that he thought Obama could be subject to impeachment. Most viewers don't realize how radical/non-mainstream an expert witness he is.
4/ I wish I could cross-examine Turley, as there are *certainly* areas of the law he knows better than I do—he's a smart man, and has real expertise in certain areas (and sometimes is even willing to deploy it apolitically!)—but he does *not* know the factual record in this case.
5/ A cross-examination of Turley would include questions about how processes are often sped up to address "justicibility," a term I would force Turley to define on the record. An issue is (and this is a bad thing) "not justiciable" if it can't be litigated in the time available.
6/ The Trump administration has tried to make impeachable conduct by a president in the last two years of his term "not justiciable" by slowing doc/witness production to the point that it (the administration) *knows* an election will come first. It's *classic* bad-faith behavior.
7/ So when Turley *pretends* he doesn't know why Democrats are *declining* to spend two years litigating every obstructive act taken by the administration in response to impeachment, he's not being honest. He *knows* Democrats (and *all lawyers*) are worried about justiciability.
8/ I urge legal analysts on cable to explain "justiciability" to Americans. It's actually not complicated.
9/ I won't engage Turley point-for-point (beyond what I did) as he's the attorney equivalent of a climate-change denier. If you reject that solicitation of a bribe is bribery and justiciability is a valid concern, or can't read a factual record, you're way outside the mainstream.
10/ But Jonathan Turley also fails the "shoe on the other foot" test based on how he approached the Obama and Clinton administrations in his comments and analysis in major media. And his failure to ensure that presidential misconduct can be treated as justiciable is unforgivable.
11/ To lawyers in the mainstream, not the liberal mainstream but *the mainstream*, the case before us is, on this record, *not* a close call on bribery, abuse of power, or obstruction. Those offenses have been proven to the level they must be and regularly are proven in America.
12/ And by the way, as a side note, "Democrat" is a *noun*, not an adjective, and the *official name* of the party is the Democratic Party, not the "Democrat Party." When you use "Democrat" as an *adjective* you sound *ignorant*, not sly. You don't get to choose your own grammar.
