More than 500 law professors sign letter calling Trump actions impeachable

More than 500 law professors have signed an open letter calling President Trump’s conduct impeachable the day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that committee chairmen should begin drafting articles of impeachment. 

The 520 professors said in the letter posted to Medium that impeachment does not require a crime, but rather an abuse of the public trust. 

“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,” the professors wrote. 

“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,” they added. 

Their letter comes a day after Pelosi said she was “asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment” into Trump after weeks of public and closed-door testimony.

On Wednesday, three law professors invited to testify by Democrats at a House Judiciary Committee hearing spoke in support of impeachment, while one professor invited by Republicans spoke against it. 

The Friday letter from professors at universities including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, cited testimony from witnesses who said that Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on politically beneficial investigations to justify calling the president’s actions impeachable. 

“Overwhelming evidence made public to date forces us to conclude that President Trump engaged in impeachable conduct,” it said. 

The professors wrote that if the House and Senate respectively voted to impeach and remove Trump, 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,” they said. 

Trump has denied wrongdoing and blasted the impeachment inquiry as a “witch hunt.”