House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi officially requested articles of impeachment against
President Trump on Thursday, and
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer asked the network's senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano for his reaction. "If you ask me if there is enough evidence on which to base articles of impeachment, the answer is yes, because impeachment is essentially political," Napolitano said, adding that
Democrats would "get more evidence if they wait to hear from Secretary [Mike] Pompeo, Director [Mick] Mulvaney, former Ambassador [John] Bolton."Assuming the House impeaches Trump and we "go to a
Senate trial, who testifies on behalf of the president?" Hemmer asked. "Himself," Napolitano replied. "You believe that could happen?" Hemmer asked. "I do," Napolitano said. "I think it will be the most dramatic legal-political event in the history of our era, with the president of the
United States testifying under oath in front of the chief justice and the full Senate and 200 million people watching on television."
Hot Air's Allahpundit found that implausible. "Can you imagine the horror among Trump's advisers and Senate cronies if he suddenly started chirping about wanting to testify?" he asked.
White House Counsel "Pat Cipollone and [Sen.] Lindsey Graham would chloroform him and lock him in the White House basement to prevent it. ... No one around him trusts him to keep his story straight if he has to answer questions under oath. He lies easily and rarely convincingly." Allahpundit talked himself up from a 0.1 percent chance to 49 percent, though, after "considering that
American politics has become a reality show, and that Trump is a compulsive narcissist who wrongly thinks he can outsmart anyone, and that he knows the TV ratings for him if he testified really would be as yuuuge as Napolitano says."In case Napolitano's views on impeaching Trump weren't clear, he told Hemmer on Wednesday that "the Democrats have credibly argued that he committed impeachable offenses," and if he were in the House, he "certainly would" vote to impeach Trump.