White House Counsel Pat Cipollone (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Earlier this week, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone wrote an eight-page letter to Congressional Democrats, where he openly mocked the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, stating not only that the president could not “permit his administration to participate in this partisan inquiry under these circumstances,” but that it “lack[ed] any legitimate constitutional foundation” and violated “the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent.”
Cipollone’s classmates from the University of Chicago Law School, one of the top law schools in the country, would beg to disagree with his assertions.
In a letter sent yesterday to Cipollone, 21 lawyers who graduated alongside him in 1991 and “hold a range of political views” expressed their disappointment with his interpretation of the laws they first learned about nearly 30 years ago. “We are sorry to see how your letter to the congressional leadership flouts the traditions of rigor and intellectual honesty that we learned together,” they wrote.
Here’s another relevant excerpt from the letter (available in full on the next page):
When any president openly invites the help of foreign powers for partisan political purposes, Congress in the exercise of its constitutional powers should conduct an inquiry and the White House should cooperate. Fair-minded lawyers can easily agree on this regardless of their politics. Your letter instead distorts the law and the Constitution for other purposes, including cable news consumption.
They want Cipollone to retract his letter. We’ll see if he’s willing to listen.
(Flip to the next page to read the University of Chicago Law School alumni’s 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.