President Donald Trump protected the integrity of the presidency against congressional encroachment by exerting executive privilege to prevent testimony from senior White House officials in congressional impeachment proceedings, said Mario Loyola, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Trump’s exertion of executive privilege to prevent senior White house officials from testifying in House hearings on impeachment and the subsequent Senate impeachment trial shielded the executive branch against Democrat-led unconstitutional attempts to expand congressional power, explained Loyola.

Democrats opted against challenging Trump’s use of executive privilege in court, noted Loyola, recalling Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Jerry Nadler, and other Democrats calling for testimony from Mick Mulvaney, John Bolton, and various senior White House officials.

“The fact that [Donald Trump] is asserting executive privilege must mean that he’s covering something up, that he’s guilty of something; therefore, he is obstructing Congress,” said Loyola of Democrats’ characterization of Trump’s motives for using executive privilege.

Loyola continued, “I wrote in the Atlantic, and I want people who are against the president — as many readers of the Atlantic are — to know that that is an astonishingly inappropriate inference for Schiff and the Democrats to make because any president — any Democratic president — would’ve asserted exactly the same privilege in that situation, and even if the president had something to gain from those people testifying in response to a House subpoena, to preserve the integrity of the office, it was [Donald Trump’s] responsibility to assert that privilege for future presidents.”



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“So I think the president did exactly the right thing there,” determined Loyola. “The obstruction of Congress charge, from the very beginning, was absolutely preposterous and incredibly inappropriate, and the Democrats have only done damage to themselves by sticking with it.”

Loyola noted that Democrats’ impeachment efforts against Trump began before the 45th president’s inauguration.

Loyola stated, “I just think that the Democrats never really had a case for impeachment. I think that they started out even before the president was inaugurated with the judgment that the president was ‘unfit for office.’ There were more than a few Republicans who felt that way, too. We remember all the Never Trumpers.”

“From the beginning of the Trump presidency, it was basically a character judgment in search of a predicate offense,” added Loyola. “In the last three years, they’ve accused him of basically everything except genocide, really.”

Loyola said, “A lot of other very strong anti-Trump voices in the Republican Party that voted for the president yesterday.”

Asked about Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) vote to impeach Trump, Loyola replied, “To me, Romney represents the very elitist Republican old guard of the past. The sort of very patrician, paternalistic kind of Republican old guard, and that party doesn’t exist anymore. The Never Trumpers are down to 13 people, from what I can tell, on the Republican side. The president’s approval ratings among Republicans are record-high for a Republican president.”

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