Law Professor Julia Metts quoted on Law360 on House lawyer’s impeachment hearing questioning skills
House Panel’s Kramer Levin Hire Brings Heat To Trump Probe
By Cara Salvatore
Law 360
Sept. 26, 2019
Excerpt
And although [Barry] Berke brought his skill as a trial lawyer to the [Corey] Lewandowski hearing, he lacked one thing: a judge to keep things fair, experts said. Bernstein of UCLA noted that Lewandowski’s habit of “making objections and sustaining his own objections” to Berke’s questions probably wouldn’t have been allowed under a judge and ended up putting more obstacles in Berke’s path than might have been.
Despite this, Berke seemed able to draw out some productive answers from the evasive Lewandowski.
Julia Metts, who heads trial advocacy education at the Stetson University College of Law, said Berke’s emotional discipline was notable. He was never sidetracked by Lewandowski’s remarks that seemed intended as provocations, nor by his outright refusals to answer certain questions, she said.
If it had been a member of Congress doing the questioning, “They would have spent 10 minutes of their time fighting about whether he had to answer it,” Metts said. When Lewandowski refuses to discuss a conversation with Trump, Berke “just says ‘OK’” and then brings up Lewandowski’s statements about that very conversation from his own book, Metts said.
This article was originally published on the Law360 website on Sept. 26, 2019, with the headline, “House Panel’s Kramer Levin Hire Brings Heat To Trump Probe.”
Post date: Nov. 4, 2019
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