Law Professor Says Trump Impeachment Team Misrepresented His Work ‘Quite Badly’

A law professor says that former president Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team “misrepresented” a 2001 article laying out the arguments for and against late impeachment “quite badly” — a claim the Trump team denies.

Brian Kalt, a professor at Michigan State Law School, published a Twitter thread on Monday after the Trump team released its brief ahead of the former president’s second impeachment trial, set to begin Tuesday.

Kalt said that his 2001 law article “The Constitutional Case for the Impeachability of Former Federal Officials: An Analysis of the Law, History, and Practice of Late Impeachment” is cited “a lot” in the brief — which argues that Trump’s trial is “nothing more nor less than the trial of a private citizen by a legislative body” and violates Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution.

“[I]n several places, they misrepresent what I wrote quite badly,” Kalt wrote. He told National Review that the Trump team did not reach out to him during the construction of the brief, and that “there are multiple places in which they cite me for saying the opposite of what I actually said.”

One point Kalt publicly noted is that his article and a footnote are cited for a line in the brief which reads, “When a President is no longer in office, the objective of an impeachment ceases.” Kalt posted the relevant pages of his article, including his analysis that the Constitution “does not clearly or necessarily say ‘impeachability equals removability.’”

Trump defense attorney David I. Schoen told National Review in a statement that “it was never our intention to in any way mislead as to Professor Kalt’s position.”

“Professor Kalt wrote an excellent piece that, in his own words, set out all of the evidence that he found on both sides,” Schoen said. “Our brief cited his explanations for the arguments he presented that we agreed with (even if he did not find them ultimately convincing) and not for the ones we did not agree with. Ultimately Professor Kalt did not agree with our position, but he did explain it well and we wanted to give him credit for that.”

As for the footnote in question, Schoen explained that “our brief was making the argument that the Constitutional text is doubly clear given the fact that the framers’ States knew the models out there and rejected them,” and that Kalt was cited “simply because he expressly recognized that some make this argument and explained it nicely in terms of being ‘self-evident.’”

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