Starr: Impeachment Coming After Sondland Testimony

There is no doubt articles of impeachment are coming after Amb. Gordon Sondland's "bombshell day" of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former special counsel Ken Starr said Wednesday during a break in the hearing. 

"There will be articles of impeachment,” Starr concluded on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "We've known that. It was just confirmed today and substantively, what we heard from the chairman [Adam Schiff] is it's over. This is his position: we now know that the president, in fact, committed the crime of bribery."

Starr said the articles of impeachment are being drawn up now if they already have not been drawn up.

"We've gotten closer to the president," Starr said.

"The president may have covered himself by saying 'no quid pro quo,' the record is muddled," Starr said. "So we have Gordon Sondland's understanding."

Starr also compared the current situation with the impeachment hearings before the resignation of former President Richard Nixon, saying it "doesn't look good" for Trump "substantively."

"The chairman began with essentially pulling out the Richard Nixon articles of impeachment, figuratively speaking, and he pointed to the third article: contempt," said Starr, "contempt in the sense of you have stood in the way of this investigation."

He added Democrats laid out a case against Trump for obstruction, noting that Sondland lacked access to records that would help him give more accurate testimony. 

That added up to the third article of Nixon's impeachment, contempt of Congress and contempt of the House in the course of impeachment, Starr said.

"It's very clear, it's very succinct, and [it's] very well done," he said, noting the article got drawn up because of Sondland's testimony. 

"He was, I thought, quite bitter and almost impassioned with respect to 'I have been stymied,'" Starr said of Sondland. "So, we now have a process crime."

Republicans still have a case against impeachment, however, said Starr, and can easily craft a response.

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