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There is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election, for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress. His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.
We take no position on whether the President committed a crime. But conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable. The standard here is constitutional; it does not depend on what Congress has chosen to criminalize.
If the House of Representatives impeached the President for the conduct described here and the Senate voted to remove him, they would be acting well within their constitutional powers. Whether President Trump’s conduct is classified as bribery, as a high crime or misdemeanor, or as both, it is clearly impeachable under our Constitution.
— an excerpt from an open letter to Congress signed by hundreds of law professors from schools across the country, sponsored by the government watchdog Protect Democracy, which reaches the conclusion that there is “overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office” and that his conduct was “clearly impeachable.”
At this time, 768 law professors from schools like Columbia; Yale; Stanford; Harvard; Duke; Emory; Georgetown; Berkeley; University of Florida; University of Pennsylvania; Albany; University of Texas; Rutgers; and the University of Georgia have signed the letter.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.