US first lady Melania Trump on Wednesday rebuked an academic who used her 13-year-old son’s name to make a point during a hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into her husband, US President Donald Trump.
Constitutional law professor Pamela Karlan invoked Barron Trump to demonstrate how the US constitution imposes distinctions between a monarch’s power and that of a president.
“The constitution says there can be no titles of nobility,” Karlan told lawmakers during the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary’s first hearing on impeachment, which featured four constitutional academics. “So while the president can name his son ‘Barron,’ he can’t make him a baron.”
The pun led to chuckles in the congressional hearing room, but Melania Trump made clear it was no laughing matter.
“A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics,” she tweeted shortly afterward. “Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it.”
Donald Trump retweeted his wife’s message.
Karlan tried to stem the damage by expressing her regret.
“I want to apologize for what I said earlier about the president’s son,” she told the panel.
“It was wrong of me to do that” she said, adding that she also wished “the president would apologize, obviously, for the things that he’s done that’s wrong.”
For years, there has been agreement that the minor children of US politicians, particularly presidents, are off limits.
During the hearing, US Representative Matt Gaetz told Karlan that invoking Trump’s son “does not lend credibility to your argument.”
“It makes you look mean,” he said.
The incident quickly brought criticism from corners far beyond the hearing room, as Republicans and members of Trump’s re-election campaign voiced disapproval.
“Democrats have disgraced themselves by giving a platform to this unhinged, petty kook,” the campaign wrote on Twitter, while its deputy director of communications, Matt Wolking, called Karlan an “unhinged liberal professor” over the comments.
“Democrats are so desperate that one of their biased witnesses is now attacking the President’s 13-year-old son. Absolutely disgraceful,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy wrote on Twitter.
US Representative Markwayne Mullin called the episode “reprehensible,” while Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Donald Trump, asked why “Hunter Biden is off-limits, but Barron Trump is not?”
The impeachment investigation is looking into Donald Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president over former US vice president Joe Biden, whose son, Hunter, was on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
RSS