Even Fox News knows Trump opened himself up to witness intimidation charges with Yovanovitch tweet: Law professor
On MSNBC's "AM Joy," Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told anchor Joy Reid that President Donald Trump's Twitter attack on former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch opens him up to new articles of impeachment over witness tampering — and even his cheerleaders on Fox News can see it.
"I want to let you listen to Fox reacting to that on Friday," said Reid.
"This whole hearing turned on a dime when the president tweeted about her in real time, and during the questioning, Adam Schiff stopped the Democratic questioning to read the president's tweet to her and get her response," said Fox News anchor Bret Baier in the clip. "Now, that enabled Schiff to then characterize that tweet as intimidating the witness or tampering with a witness, which is a crime, adding essentially an article of impeachment real time as this hearing is going on."
"Do you agree with that, professor?" asked Reid. "Do you think that Donald Trump will wind up facing an article of intimidating a witness?"
"I think it's clear he will," said Tribe. "I think Bret is right. I don't always agree with people on Fox, but this was intimidating right out in the open, and the fact that Yovanovitch had the candor to say that she doesn't know what the president's purposes were, even though I think we can all surmise, but that the effect was intimidating makes it clear that this will be part of the impeachment articles."
"It's not just Ambassador Yovanovitch who is being intimidated," added Tribe. "No, it's all the other people who know firsthand things that President Trump did in order to distort foreign policy for his own benefits. A number of them are going to testify, but some others might be really less courageous than Ambassador Yovanovitch and might not want to expose themselves to the ton of bricks that this president is capable of dumping on anyone's head through his Twitter feed the moment they displease him or say something that exposes him."
"He's obviously terribly insecure, he's insecure even about his own legitimacy as president. That's why I'm increasingly inclined to think of him as the anti-president," continued Tribe. "He doesn't really know that he's there legitimately. That's why he wants to cover up Russia's role in getting him there and pretending it was Ukraine and he is simply turning the whole presidency into a vanity project while the country suffers."
Watch below: