The former New Jersey Superior Court judge noted in his latest column on the conservative news network’s website how “law students are taught early on that a trial is not a grudge match or an ordeal; it is a search for the truth.”

But that search, he continued, “requires witnesses, and when the command from Senate Republican leaders came down that there shall be no witnesses, the truth-telling mission of Trump’s trial was radically transformed into a steamroller of political power.”

GOP senators voted last week to block witnesses, including former White House national security adviser John Bolton, from testifying in Trump’s trial. That all but ensured the president’s acquittal in Wednesday’s vote.

Napolitano, who has not shied away from breaking ranks with his pro-Trump colleagues at Fox to criticize the president, said “Trump will luxuriate in his victory.” But the pundit accused the president of trashing the oath he took to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

“How? By manipulating Senate Republicans to bar firsthand evidence and keep it from senatorial and public scrutiny, Trump and his Senate collaborators have insulated him and future presidents from the moral and constitutional truism that no president is above the law,” he concluded. “Somewhere, Richard Nixon is smiling.”