In a new interview for an upcoming PBS documentary, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly says she believes President Donald Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial is “rigged.”
Kelly appears in an upcoming PBS Frontline documentary airing in mid-January about the political divide in the United States, where she discusses everything from hearing Barack Obama speak for the first time to her feud with Trump throughout the 2016 election campaign.
In the interview, Kelly also answers questions about Trump’s impeachment (the interview was conducted before Trump was officially impeached on Wednesday evening).
“The trial’s kind of rigged, right?” Kelly says. “The jury’s kind of set in the Senate because the Republicans control it. I don’t see enough Republicans in that body turning on a man who’s about to face re-election anyway and is going to be in the voters’ hands anyway, doing something that radical as finding him guilty if articles of impeachment come over from the House.”
Although the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump on Wednesday, the president will stand trial in the Senate, where it’s widely expected the Republican majority will vote to acquit him on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Kelly notes the founding fathers left the constitutional stance on impeachment vague in order to leave legal “wiggle room.”
“If they’d just said ‘high crimes’ — you know, ‘treason and high crimes’ — we’d know what the standard was,” Kelly says. “But ‘and misdemeanors’ opens it up, because they’re not talking about misdemeanors like he jaywalked, right? That opens it up to it could be improper conduct. It could be abuse of power.”
Democrats and Republicans have debated throughout the months-long impeachment investigation on what constitutes “abuse of power” and whether Trump did, in fact, abuse his power as president.
During Wednesday’s impeachment debate on the House floor, Republican representatives claimed House Democrats were treating Trump unfairly. One Republican representative alluded to Trump’s impeachment as a comparable tragedy to Pearl Harbor, while another claimed Jesus was afforded more rights before his crucifixion than Trump had been during the impeachment investigation.
Trump declined to testify during the impeachment investigation, as well as other top officials in the Trump administration.
Wednesday’s debate on the House floor over impeachment was also similar to Kelly’s statements about how Democrats and Republicans see Trump’s impeachment differently.
“Much like pornography, that’s in the eye of the beholder,” Kelly says in her interview. “As the Supreme Court said, ‘I know it when I see it.’ Well, so what does that mean? That means it boils down to politics, and people are going to see it through their own partisan lenses.”
Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate is expected to begin in January.
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