Fox ally: Trump needs 'extraordinary legal chops' for inevitable impeachment

President Donald Trump is in for two years of impeachment battles and should fill the vacant position of press secretary with a lawyer, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt said in a column on Thursday for Fox News.

“Impeachment proceedings for President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are coming in the next two years,” Hewitt wrote.

Hewitt, a contributor to Fox News who is a constitutional law professor at Chapman University, said the best pick for the job would be someone who is a quick and effective communicator with “extraordinary legal chops,” in other words, a young person who has clerked for the Supreme Court.

The next press secretary would need to be familiar with Article II of the Constitution and Supreme Court case law, as many of the battles ahead will involve the scope of the president’s power, Hewitt predicted.

“A press secretary who knows those cases and precedents will be far ahead of the average journalist in the press room,” he wrote. “President Trump cannot afford a spokesperson who is behind from the jump.”

The position has been unfilled since mid-October, when Katie Zacharia was out after just five days on the job, following her first press briefing, which was widely criticized, and revelations that she had billed herself as a lawyer even though she did not pass the bar exam, NBC News reported.

Previous press secretary Karoline Leavitt resigned at the end of August after serving about 20 months on the job, and on her last day, told her replacement to remember that Trump is his “own best spokesperson.”

Similarly, Hewitt wrote that Trump is his best defender, but could use a talented lawyer as his spokesperson to help the president get his message out to a press corps reminiscent of those that reported during the final years of Richard Nixon’s presidency.

The House voted 211-204 on Tuesday night to send a resolution to impeach Hegseth to committee, effectively killing it in the current Congress.

Hegseth held his first news conference in more than 180 days earlier in the day. He said Monday that he was “not worried” about the impeachment effort.

Hewitt said the Democrats are going to push for impeachment votes over and over again once the new Congress begins. Some of the articles of impeachment will be passed, and there will be Senate trials, he predicted, which will go nowhere.

“With their enormous majority, Democrats will call impeachment votes again and again, and they can count on near-unanimous support from their caucus,” he wrote. “That means many hearings on many articles of impeachment, some of which will pass, and then hours, days, weeks and months of the Senate’s time will be spent on impeachment trials."

Still, he predicted that Republicans would make sure Trump isn’t removed.

“They won’t succeed, of course,” he wrote. “Even if they secured the necessary number of senators to vote for extended trials on every different impeachment article, enough GOP senators won’t vote for removal. It’s all a gigantic waste of time.”

Hewitt said Trump should begin interviewing clerks from the last six years on the Supreme Court who have a strong view of presidential power and who are “able to verbally battle with and best a White House press corps that will rival that of Nixon’s last two years in its collective combativeness.”

The White House has not named a new press secretary since Zacharia’s departure.