Trump's Lawyers Argue President Can't Be Punished for Violating Foreign Policy Because President Sets Foreign Policy; Naval War College Professor Tom Nichols Discusses Impeachment Not About Policy At All.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump's lawyers at his impeachment trial are standing by one of their key arguments that the president can't be punished for violating foreign policy because he is the policy, and he alone can dictate what that policy is. Here's the question to the president's legal team from Republican Senators. It is read by the chief justice.</s>JOHN ROBERTS, CHIEF JUSTICE, U.S. SUPREME COURT: The House managers have argued aggressively that the president's actions contravene U.S. foreign policy. Isn't the president's place, certainly more than career civil servants, to conduct foreign policy?</s>PATRICK PHILBIN, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY COUNSEL: It is definitely the president's place to set U.S. foreign policy. And the Constitution makes this clear. Article II, Section I vests the entirety of the executive authority in a president of the United States. And it's critically important in our constitutional structure that that authority is vested solely in the president.</s>COOPER: Tom Nichols is an author, professor of the naval college. Tom, thanks for being with us. You put an opinion piece in today's "USA Today" that I thought was really interesting because you say this trial and this impeachment wasn't about policy at all, that what the president was doing was not -- it wasn't about policy.</s>TOM NICHOLS, PROFESSOR, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE, HARVARD EXTENSION SCHOOL & AUTHOR: Right. The United States has a policy on Ukraine and Russia. And people like Fiona Hill and John Bolton and Alexander Vindman and others were trying to follow that policy. What the president did was to create a second policy under the blankets. As I say in the piece, it's not really a policy. It's more of a scheme where he deputized people who don't work in the government. I should say, I don't speak for the U.S. government. He deputized people who are not government employees, people like Rudy Giuliani, and told them to do things that were in direct contravention of stated American policy, which was to help Ukraine. So the people, who were trying to further the president's policy, did their constitutional duty. They reported it and tried to deal with it when they found evidence of some kind of plot to undermine what they thought was actually the president's stated policy. The president's lawyers and the Republicans in the Senate are trying to be very clever and call anything that the president does policy. By that reasoning, you could never impeach the president for anything, because all he would have to do is say, well, it was policy. That's a ridiculous argument</s>COOPER: The president's actions and Rudy Giuliani's actions were actually undermining what official U.S. policy was. They were -- the ambassador to Ukraine, whether you think she was doing a good job or not, she was trying to execute American foreign policy, which was an anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.</s>NICHOLS: You know, and it's really sad to see people who clearly know better, somebody has obviously intelligent as Senator Lee asking this question and throwing out these cheap shots about, you know, unelected bureaucrats. Those appointees and civil service people were trying to further the president's policy. The publicly stated policy was, we are going to help Ukraine against Russia. The president then sent in his personal lawyer to say, stop helping Ukraine against Russia. And when challenged, the president's lawyers say, well, they were both policies and everybody should have just been doing what the president wanted at any given moment. The president does set policy. On that, the president's lawyers are absolutely right. But the president doesn't have the right to set policy as a hidden policy, keep it from the Congress, keep it from the government, and break the law while doing it. That whole argument is just completely laughable. But it gets traction because, again, it makes it sound like there's all this disloyalty and rank insubordination throughout the government.</s>COOPER: It's a continuation of this sort of drumbeat it seems like we're hearing from the president's attorneys, essentially, that Donald Trump is the state, which is an argument that Adam Schiff was making, that there's nothing distinguishing the interests of Donald Trump and the interests of America, that they are one and the same because he is the state.</s>NICHOLS: Yes, that argument is just crazy. It's un-American. And it's unconstitutional. Donald Trump is the custodian of the Article I executive power for his term in office. He does not magically become the personalization of state power like some kind of a monarch. You know, and it shows you how far the president's team is going, that they're basically saying that whatever the president does is perfectly acceptable because the president did it. They're taking Richard Nixon's line that if the president does it, it's not illegal. And they're taking it even further and saying, if the president does it, it's good and right and everyone must do it, too. And that's just ridiculous.</s>COOPER: Tom Nichols, I appreciate it. Thanks very much.</s>NICHOLS: Thanks for having me.</s>COOPER: In a short time from now, the question-and-answer phase of the impeachment trial will resume. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moments ago, saying the president won't be truly acquitted if there are no new witnesses in the Senate trial.