Campaign official: Impeachment talks won’t hurt Trump

Impeachment talks may be heating up in Washington, D.C., but not everyone in the Hudson Valley believes it should or will hurt the president.

Jason Meister, a Trump supporter and member of his 2020 re-election campaign, says he's read the transcripts of the president's call with the Ukrainian president five times and can’t find what was wrong in the transcript.
Meister says he doesn't see how it could lead to possible impeachment.

“There was no quid pro quo in that transcript. And I read it again five or six times. It was just the president effectively talking about the rule of law. To me, there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's really just about the Democrats relitigating the 2016 election,” he says.

Constitutional scholar and Pace Law School professor Bennett Gershman sees the situation through a different lens.

“Trump clearly urged a foreign government to investigate an American citizen and not just any American citizen, his chief political rival,” he says.

Gershman believes the president betrayed the country and broke the law in that phone call. He says he understands the process the House is apparently headed for has nothing to do with the law.

“The House of Representatives, the majority, has to decide that Trump's conduct rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanors, and it’s their judgment. No court is going to override what they say,” he says. “Impeachment is a political process, it is not a legal process. The courts have no role in the impeachment proceeding.”