“If Justice Roberts won’t preside over this sham ‘impeachment’ then why would it ever be considered legitimate?” the Kentucky Republican tweeted Friday. “Hint: It won’t be.”
Later in the day, Paul joined Fox News’s Sean Hannity and explained his impeachment opinion, declaring it an “illegitimate procedure” if Roberts isn’t there.
“It isn’t a real impeachment. It’s going to be a fake, partisan impeachment,” Paul said about impeachment without Roberts.
“The story is,” Paul continued, “that the chief justice is not going to be asked, but the reason he’s not going to be asked is he’s privately said he’s not supposed to come unless it’s an impeachment of the president.”
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“So, this is an illegitimate procedure,” he said. “And even the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who's not a rabid Trump person, who's actually, if anything, sort of in the middle, he is now saying this is illegitimate because I’m not getting in the middle of this and I’m not coming over for this.”
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It is unclear whether or not Roberts will lead over the Senate impeachment trial, set to begin on Feb. 9, and legal scholars have made opposing claims concerning the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial for a private citizen.
Biden, a Democrat who won the 2020 election over Donald Trump, repeatedly called for unity during his first speech as president. But Paul said Biden's words correlate with the actions he's taken so far.
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Calling for unity, Paul said, would include a call to end the impeachment trial facing Trump in the Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives last week voted to impeach Trump for a second time over the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The Senate could begin formal steps in that trial in the following days.
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"If he thinks he's going to bring the country together by impeaching a former president, I don't know what he's smoking — because really he's just going to divide the country further," Paul said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program.
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Paul was a strong Trump supporter throughout the former GOP president's four years in office. He backed Trump's false claims of election fraud, at one point saying the race "in many ways was stolen," before denouncing the violence of the Jan. 6 riot and eventually voting against the challenge to the election results.
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