Schultz: Dems Rushing Impeachment on Potentially Inadmissible Evidence

On Episode 61 of War Room: Impeachment Jim Schultz, lawyer and former Associate White House Counsel to Donald Trump, joined Stephen K. Bannon to discuss the President’s lack of participation in the Judiciary hearings, the Democrats’ game plan, and whether or not the hearsay evidence the Democrats base their impeachment case on is admissible.

Bannon began the discussion by asking Schultz about the White House’s participation in the House inquiry: “Pat Cipollone sent a letter [to the House Judiciary] yesterday saying, ‘we’re not in, we’re not going to participate in this.’ Do you think that’s a smart move, not a smart move? Strategically how do you place this?”

“It’s consistent with what they’ve been doing. I think it’s a good move,” the former White House Counsel said.

He elaborated: “This process has been problematic from the beginning. It started out in Nadler’s committee and that was a train wreck. Corey Lewandowski came and embarrassed them, and they couldn’t ask a question. It wasn’t an effective way to prosecute any case. So they move it over into Schiff’s committee. They do that in the basement, it’s leak, leak, leak. And now we get to the point where they do this third phase which has been, quite frankly, another fake hearing if you will. This whole process has been flawed from the beginning.”

“Nixon and Clinton: they fought tooth and nail in Judiciary, did they not?” Bannon asked. 

“Right, but this is a little different.” Schultz explained: “In Nixon there was a criminal investigation, in Clinton there was an independent counsel that did an investigation. In this case, it was Adam Schiff’s sham committee that kind of rammed everything through.”

He noted: “And by the way, the President has every right to object to witnesses coming in there for executive privilege and a number of other things. And in this instance, the Democrats in Congress didn’t take those matters to court. So you have got witnesses that didn’t even come in and testify…”

“[Democrats] don’t care what the facts are, they just want to get it through [the Judiciary Committee] quickly. And part of that is that there’s legal issues and the political issues. Polling is going down on this. The popularity of impeachment at this point in time in waning, and it’s going down day by day. If I’m the Democrats in the House, I want to get this through as quickly as possible, and get it over with, and get it in the Senate.”

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“Let me counter that,” Bannon interjected. “If the President participated, could he not have slowed it down? Nadler actually asked them: ‘what do you want to do to participate?’ Could he not have slowed this process down and pushed it into 2020?”

“Why push it into 2020?” Schultz pushed back. “The best evidence in this case came out months ago: the transcript. The rest of it is all crowd noise. All these witnesses that came through…if they were testifying in a court of law, if they had to go and testify as to the knowledge they had a lot of the facts that were derived from their testimony would be inadmissible in a court of law.”

Bannon clarified with the former White House Counsel: “Will it be inadmissible in the Senate trial?” 

“That depends on how the Senate approaches this thing.” Schultz furthered: “If they apply the federal rules of evidence to it a lot of this would not be admissible. There’s a reason why our courts don’t accept hearsay evidence: because it’s not reliable. At the end of the day, it’s not reliable. And in this instance, that’s all [the Democrats] have. The best evidence here is that transcript.”

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