Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan, one of three expert witnesses called by Democrats to testify on the first day of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry, donated $1000 to the presidential campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in July, according to to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data.
Karlan gave the Warren for President, Inc. campaign committee two separate $500 donations on July 29, 2019, the FEC reports.
Separately, Karlan also donated $500 to the 2020 campaign of first-term Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA), one of seven Democrats to win a Republican-held seat in the 2018 midterm elections. Harder fought a close contest against Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA), an incumbent with strong local support in the Central Valley. Harder’s campaign attracted donations and volunteers from the San Francisco Bay Area. His district, the 10th, will be competitive again in 2020.
In April, Warren was among the first presidential candidates to call for President Donald Trump to be impeached, in the wake of the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on “Russia collusion.” Though Mueller found no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Warren said Trump deserved to be impeached for allegedly obstructing the investigation.
Harder came out in support of an impeachment inquiry on Sep. 24 — the same day as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and a day before the transcript of Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenksy was released. Karlan is one of three Democratic witnesses who will testify, together with one Republican witness, about the constitutionality of the current impeachment effort. In May 2017, she said Trump behaved “extraordinarily badly” in firing then-FBI Director James Comey.
In 2013, during President Barack Obama’s second term, Karlan was considered a possible Supreme Court nominee. Former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams wrote at the time that Karlan “provides intellectual fuel for the most fringe elements of the progressive legal and political machine,” accusing her of “scholarly lies,” saying she “falsely attacked the Bush administration’s Justice Department for not protecting racial minorities.”
Adams concluded: “Hopefully Democrats and Republicans alike can agree that it is best to keep a dishonest academic in her position as a dishonest academic. Her corrosive and bitter worldview is best kept in the insular world of academia, where her damage can be contained to corrupting scores of would-be lawyers who don’t have a clue about who is really standing at the lectern.”
On Wednesday, she will help decide the fate of a U.S. President.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.