https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/461914-nadlers-house-committee-holds-a-faux-hearing-in-search-of-a-false-crime
The House Judiciary Committee’s faux impeachment hearing on Tuesday was an exercise in legal obfuscation about obstruction.
It is a curious exercise, because the House does not need a criminal obstruction offense in order to impeach the president. But it is a telling exercise, too: Democrats are pretending they have an actual crime, just as they are pretending to engage in an actual impeachment inquiry. Acknowledging the absence of a crime would demonstrate that Chairman Jerry Nadler’s hearings are nakedly political.
As their first witness since Nadler (D-N.Y.) outlined his impeachment investigation without a House vote endorsing one, committee Democrats called Corey Lewandowski, the president’s confidant and one-time campaign manager. The purpose was not to plumb new ground. Congressional Democrats and the White House are arguing over executive privilege; the committee was on notice that Lewandowski — who already had cooperated with the special counsel and testified before Congress three times — would not answer questions about his communications with the president beyond what is laid out in the Mueller report.
Consequently, the purpose of the hearing was to read, again and again, a portion of that report that Democrats deem terribly damaging. To wit, in June-July 2017, Trump instructed Lewandowski — who was not formally on the White House staff — to urge then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit his recusal from the Russia investigation, so that Sessions then could narrow the scope of Mueller’s investigation. The idea was that Mueller would be permitted to continue investigating in order to prevent Russian interference in future elections, but drop the investigation of whether Trump’s campaign interfered in the 2016 election.
Lewandowski never carried out the president’s directive. Yet, by the Democrats’ lights, Trump’s actions amount to felony obstruction of justice. On these facts, however, there can be no such crime.