Donald Trump Will ‘Go Down In Flames’ Like Richard Nixon If He Ignores Impeachment Inquiry, Neal Katyal Says

A former U.S. official and current Supreme Court lawyer has issued a bold proclamation, claiming that the outcome of the House impeachment inquiry won’t be too favorable for President Donald Trump should he continue his current strategy of avoiding and ignoring Democratic efforts to impeach him.

Neal Katyal, who served in the Obama administration as acting solicitor general in 2010 and 2011 and currently is a Supreme Court lawyer and Georgetown University Law professor, evoked President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal to explain why he believed that Trump’s refusal to cooperate wouldn’t be effective long-term.

“There’s one president who tried that before. His name was Richard Nixon and he went down in flames,” Katyal said. “And I suspect the same thing will happen here if the president does this.”

Katyal made the comments on an appearance earlier this week on The Beat With Ari Melber on MSNBC, according to a report from Newsweek. The former Obama official also took to Twitter on Tuesday to share a link of his appearance on another MSNBC show, The 11th Hour With Brian Williams, in which he claimed that Trump would be impeached.

Katyal also said he believed the president’s strategy, which he deemed an “avalanche wall,” was based on repeated attempts to hide the truth from the American people. Katyal then seemed to imply that things would begin to unravel for the president as public servants, like Michael McKinley, former senior advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have agreed to testify before the House despite orders to ignore the subpoenas by the White House.

Impeachment was a frequent point of discussion at Tuesday night’s debate between the Democratic Party’s candidates attempting to win the party’s nomination to run against Trump next year. All candidates in the still-crowded field have said they supported the inquiry, though candidates gave varied answers regarding its importance and long-term impact.

The president, meanwhile, has continued to claim that he believes the House impeachment inquiry, announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in September, is “illegitimate” unless the House decides to vote to begin one. But as The Inquisitr has previously reported, Pelosi has held her ground and said the House is not yet prepared to vote on the issue.

“There’s no requirement that we have a vote, and so at this time we will not be having a vote,” Pelosi told reporters Tuesday.

Per The Inquisitr, the president and House Republicans have argued that the minority party has been shut out of the House’s impeachment proceedings, and a formal vote would give them a greater role in the process. As a result, several individuals have refused to comply with House Democrat subpoenas – at the direction of the White House – following the administration’s announcement that it would not cooperate with the House’s effort.

The impeachment inquiry stemmed from a whistleblower who filed an official complaint in August after he received information regarding the president’s now-infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to the whistleblower and according to a summarized transcript of the conversation released by the White House, Trump asked for a “favor” relating to an investigation to a conspiracy relating to former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

At the Tuesday night debate, hosted by CNN and The New York Times in Westerville, Ohio, Biden reiterated that his son did nothing wrong or illegal in his dealings in foreign nations. Since the phone call, which the president has insisted was “perfect” and that he did not do anything wrong, Trump has publicly called on both Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens.