Rep. Nadler, who has fought Trump before, now wields a big gavel
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) is seen before a committee hearing titled "Protecting Dreamers and TPS Recipients" in the Rayburn Building on Wednesday. Credit: AP/Tom Williams
While a state assemblyman in the 1980s, Jerry Nadler first tangled with developer Donald Trump over a planned project at the site of the old Penn rail yards.
Trump was looking to build the tallest structure in the United States along with a TV studio, shopping mall, private park and whatever else.
Just like Long Islanders who once opposed his catering-hall plan for Jones Beach, Manhattan activists organized against it, Nadler included.
With Nadler in Congress by the 1990s, the president-to-be was still trying to get federal help for his construction plans, and the then-rotund representative fought the necessary highway changes to get Riverside South built.
"Fat Jerry Nadler is doing me a favor. He's too stupid to realize it. He's making me a lot of money," Trump was quoted in New York magazine as saying, displaying the same kind of class and subtlety he brought to the White House 20 years later.
With the help of gastric bypass surgery, Democrat Nadler, now 71, dropped much of the weight by 2001. His new battle, with the GOP president, looms way larger than the old municipal wars.
Last November's party turnover in Congress made him Judiciary Committee chairman. So the stage was well set when the committee sent 81 document-request letters to both public and private associates of Trump, a wide net that could lead to impeachment proceedings, depending, of course, on what is discovered and when.
"It's very clear that the president obstructed justice," Nadler said in a recent televised interview. "It's very clear, 1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt.
"He tried to protect Flynn from being investigated by the FBI. He fired Comey in order to stop the 'Russian thing,' as he told NBC News ... He's intimidated witnesses. In public."
A liberal partisan? Surely. Back in the day he called the impeachment of President Bill Clinton a "partisan railroad job."
On Dec. 18, 1998 Nadler talked about it on the House floor in terms that the GOP may at some point try to throw back at him.
"The nation’s leading scholars and historians overwhelmingly agree that impeachment is reserved under the Constitution only for abuses of presidential power that undermine the structure of functioning of government or of constitutional liberty," Nadler said at the time.
"It is not intended as a punishment for crimes but as a protection against the president who would abuse his powers to make himself a tyrant. That is why Benjamin Franklin called impeachment a substitute for assassination."
Naturally, Nadler now increases in stature as a Republican target. He seemed unfazed last month when Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, appearing before the committee, sidestepped a question and taunted the chairman: "I see that your five minutes is up."
Nadler laughed lightly and then pursued the question, which involved the degree to which Whitaker communicated with special counsel Robert Mueller's office. Whitaker ultimately insisted "I have not interfered in any way" with that probe.
For his part, an agitated Trump last week tweeted a message that sounded way less composed than the "Fat Jerry" attack of 24 years ago.
"Nadler, (Rep. Adam) Schiff and the Dem heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY. 81 letter sent to innocent people to harass them. They won’t get ANYTHING done for our Country!”
Thus the dialogue, if that's the right term, resumes.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
