Rudy Giuliani: Chief Justice Can Dismiss Trump’s Impeachment
The president’s lawyer claims the trial should be deemed unconstitutional, but also says it would be “politically” good for Trump.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty
Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox News late Saturday to argue that the Supreme Court should dismiss the impeachment trial against President Trump, bizarrely likening the charges against the president to an indictment for “not looking nice.”
In a rambling interview, the president’s personal lawyer appeared to simultaneously argue that the Supreme Court can and should nullify the impeachment while in the same breath admitting the Senate trial would benefit Trump.
Claiming that the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges against Trump are essentially made up, Giuliani said, “The remedy is to go before the Supreme Court of the United States and have it declared unconstitutional.”
Acknowledging that “there’s nothing in the Constitution that would allow the Supreme Court” to do that, Giuliani said: “There’s also nothing in the Constitution … that allows the Supreme Court to declare a law of Congress unconstitutional. Marshall made it up.”
“Suppose somebody charged me with not looking nice tonight … and brought me on trial before the New York Supreme Court. … It would be dismissed,” he said.
“The rules are set by the Senate. Then the Chief Justice interprets the rules. The Chief Justice will be given the power to dismiss,” Giuliani argued.
If the impeachment trial is not blocked, he said, Trump would be “acquitted” but there would be no limits on impeachment and then “the next group of maybe crazy Republicans are going to go after some Democrat.”
“I can even argue that politically it would be better to go to trial! They’ll find out about Biden, they’ll find out what a big crook Biden is,” Giuliani said.
Apparently forgetting about Ukraine entirely—the country where his own crusade to expose Biden’s supposed corruption has proven central to the impeachment proceedings—Giuliani said a trial means that “they’ll find out that Biden just didn’t make money in Iran, but he made money in China, and he made money in Iraq.”
Trump himself has previously vowed to “head to the U.S. Supreme Court” in case of impeachment proceedings against him, and he singled Giuliani out on Twitter for a “thank you” late Saturday after the lawyer pushed the argument on Fox News. In a 1993 opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, however, the Supreme Court itself ruled that “the judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, were not chosen to have any role in impeachments.”