Ken Starr, the independent counsel who probed President Bill Clinton, said that the impeachment of President Donald Trump is an attempt to overthrow him.
“That is abuse of power. We are going to impeach him before he’s done anything. Excuse me, you are using your power in a very vicious way,” Starr said.
“Whatever you think of him—you don’t think well of him, you think ill of him—it is not your business to use power in such an unprincipled way. Again, shame on you.”
Asked if the impeachment was an effort to overthrow the president, Starr said: “Absolutely.”
“Because of this, the Ukrainian subchapter, fitting into the larger volume of, ‘we are going to impeach him.’ Robert Mueller crashed and burned, bless his heart, an honorable man in July with his testimony. ... It was like of Heaven, here comes Ukraine.”
Feldman has said the refusal from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate after the House approved them means Trump isn’t actually impeached.
“It’s an impeachment with a footnote or with an asterisk,” Starr said, adding that Feldman is “making a really good point” before adding: “By the way, it never went over to the Senate, which I think means that it’s a bit of a phony impeachment.”
Pelosi has said she will withhold the articles until Democrats are assured of a “fair trial” in the Senate, which is controlled by the GOP.
“She appears to be intruding into the power of the Senate which is ironic in the extreme, isn’t it?” Starr said. “So, I think there is an abuse of House power in the way that this process unfolded in the House and riding rough-shod over minority rights and, ultimately, the rights of the president.”
He said what Pelosi was doing “is just wrong constitutionally” and claimed what Pelosi was doing amounted to a quid pro quo.
Starr has said in recent weeks that Trump did appear to commit a crime, asserting after U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified to Congress that “we now know that the president, in fact, committed the crime of bribery.”
Speaking before the articles of impeachment were announced—the articles didn’t end up including bribery—Starr said during an appearance on Fox that “this has obviously been one of those bombshell days.”
Starr is a Fox contributor.
