House impeachment manager Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) repeatedly told the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on Wednesday night that the House case was “proven beyond any doubt at all.”
Nadler’s odd, and repeated, claim seemed to undermine claims by Democrats that they needed to see more witnesses and documents in the trial. The House Judiciary Committee chairman played an unusually understated role in the first day of the question-and-answer session in the Senate.
Republicans have asked that if Democrats are so confident in their case — confident enough to impeach a president for only the third time in American history — then they should allow that case to stand or fall based on the evidence collected in the House, not by adding new evidence.
Nadler added, at one point, that simply because the House Democrats had, in his view, proven their case beyond all doubt, that was not a reason to stop adding more evidence. It “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have more proof if it comes forward,” he told the Senate.
Democrats and White House lawyers disagreed over the standard of proof. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told Senators they were the individual arbiters of the standard required, according to their constitutional oath.
Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin disagreed, arguing that the Constitution likened impeachment to a criminal process and therefore proof beyond a reasonable doubt was required.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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