A new book from Norman Eisen tells the story of the lawyers who have fought President Donald Trump, from the coalition of lawyers who confronted him since his inauguration to congressional staffers who worked to push for his removal from office.

In his book, "A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump," Eisen, who served alongside Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel's Barry Berke as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings, lays out the struggles they faced in trying to make the case for impeachment tied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller III's investigation, and later over Trump's push for Ukrainian investigations into the Bidens while withholding military aid.

Eisen's book, to be published Tuesday, reveals some of the closed-door proceedings that took place during and in the run-up to last year's impeachment in the House and the Senate trial earlier this year. The book highlights the importance of his connections within the legal community, and describes how counsel cooled on the idea of fighting Trump in court after initially making litigation a cornerstone of their strategy.

Here are some main takeaways from Eisen's book.

>> The 'Legal Resistance' Against Trump

Eisen writes in the book that, before Trump was even inaugurated, a group of lawyers he labels the "legal Resistance" held weekly calls on Fridays about how to counter the administration in court. "As Trump's offenses escalated by the day and often by the hour, the opposition ballooned to more than a hundred groups, with thousands of lawyers, other professionals, and volunteers preparing countless legal actions. Our legal Resistance group included those who fought Russian interference, the Muslim ban, possible Hatch Act violations, Jared Kushner's security clearance; we even fought Trump on using the presidential seal at his golf course," Eisen writes.

However, Eisen later wrote that his "faith in the courts was gradually tempered by reality as well," describing the litigation as "grinding painfully slowly through the legal system."

He also said that before Trump was even inaugurated, constitutional scholar John Bonifaz called him to discuss impeaching Trump as soon as he was sworn in over Emoluments Clause violations by continuing to profit from private businesses while still in office. However, Eisen said he "helped lead the majority camp opposing immediate impeachment."

"We conceded that Trump had gone beyond any other president in recent history in terms of the breadth and depth of his constitutional offenses, but we also knew that we needed to bring you, the American people, along first," he wrote.

Bonifaz, co-founder and president of the group Free Speech For People, in an interview called it a "serious mistake" for that coalition to not start immediately pushing for impeachment. "If you're seeing a crime about to happen, and then in fact you see it happen—you don't then wait for another crime to take place, or for many more crimes to take place, before you act." he said.

>> Doubts Over House Judiciary's Litigation Strategy

Eisen writes he and Berke helped craft a road map to impeach Trump once they were hired as special counsel for the House Judiciary. They argued to staff and members that they should go to court for key evidence in the case, but both staff and lawmakers, including House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, questioned whether it would be quick enough.

"Barry and I explained our belief, especially given the extraordinary stakes involved, that while the president would certainly engage in dilatory tactics, we would do everything in our power to push through these cases as briskly as possible once they were filed," Eisen writes. "The success of our strategy depended on it."

But later, when the attorneys told House Judiciary Democrats that final rulings in the lawsuits wouldn't land until 2020 or later, "Nadler and the members were uneasy." (Final judgments in those cases have still not yet been handed down.) "If Trump was as dangerous as we had warned, how could the committee wait as long as this new timeline?" Eisen added.

Later, when the allegations about Ukraine emerged, House Democrats raised concerns that going to court would take too long to hold Trump accountable. 

"There was simply no time for litigation, particularly if these allegations were true. Whatever we did, it had to be fast. We had to move at the speed of Trump if we wanted to hold him accountable," Eisen writes. 

The House Judiciary Committee avoided at least one court fight: Eisen writes that Mueller was so opposed to appearing before Congress that one of the special counsel's deputies, Aaron Zebley, "went so far as to imply they would fight a subpoena."

>> The Behind-the-Scenes Impeachment Lawyering

The use of outside attorneys such as Eisen and Berke was crucial to the impeachment process, but Eisen's book spotlights the permanent committee staffers who worked behind the scenes. He describes marathon sessions with Judiciary counsel such as Arya Hariharan, Sarah Istel, Perry Apelbaum and Aaron Hiller, and collaborating with other key staffers such as Nadler's chief of staff Amy Rutkin and House Intelligence counsel Maher Bitar. 

Once the impeachment proceedings went into high gear, the Judiciary Committee hired Joshua Matz of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, Kerry Tirrell of Sullivan & Cromwell, and Maggie Goodlander, a former Senate aide then at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Eisen also writes that before Berke was brought on board, former Clinton impeachment lawyer Abbe Lowell was offered the job, but Lowell turned it down, as he was representing Jared Kushner.

There were also occasional clashes between attorneys working for different congressional committees. Eisen describes cursing out House Intelligence Committee investigator Daniel Goldman after Goldman said the Judiciary Committee's early Trump probes were encroaching into his committee's territory.

There were later tense negotiations among House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Nadler and their respective staffs, joined by House general counsel Douglas Letter, over what kind of legal protections Trump should be offered during the impeachment proceedings. 

And at times, tensions rose over the Judiciary Committee's work and efforts to push for impeachment. "Judiciary staff may think it is impeachment, but it is not," Speaker Nancy Pelosi told members at one meeting before a formal decision on whether to impeach had been reached, according to the book. "They may think they run the place, but they do not. That's a caucus decision, not theirs. And you can tell them that."

>> The Abandoned Articles of Impeachment

Eisen writes that he and Berke, as well as Judiciary Committee attorneys Hariharan and Matt Morgan, began drafting potential articles of impeachment in August 2019, modeled after the articles passed against President Richard Nixon. There were nine articles: collusion; obstruction of justice; hush-money payments; obstruction of Congress; failure to protect and defend the Constitution; emoluments; abuse of power through pardon dangling; usurpation of the appropriations power for building the border wall; and usurpation of the appropriations power for tariffs. Eisen writes that he added a spot for a 10th article after Berke made a "tongue-in-cheek" suggestion for one, about "the next high crime."

The former House Judiciary Committee counsel writes that when the Ukraine allegations emerged, counsel folded them into the article for "failure to protect and defend the Constitution." And when the final selection of articles were up for debate, Nadler pushed for an article alleging obstruction of justice tied more closely to allegations from the Mueller report, but lost that battle. 

Instead, Eisen and Matz included language in the other two articles—for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—"designed to highlight and reference the recurrence of both abuse and obstruction."

Committee leaders and staff also debated whether to charge Trump with bribery in the abuse-of-power article, ultimately deciding to mention it but not "lead with that as our theory of the case," according to the book.

>> The Long-Standing Legal Connections

Throughout the book, Eisen writes of how he and Berke had ties to most, if not all, attorneys who represented figures and organizations in their sight lines as part of their Trump dealings. Eisen says that, when the committee sent out letters to individuals and groups seeking documents tied to Trump, the requests "flushed out the lawyers for the eighty-one recipients." 

"Between us, Barry and I knew virtually every one of them. Countless conversations, revelations, and relationships sprang from that, each one contributing to the trajectory of our year," Eisen writes.

Eisen also writes their existing relationship with Robert Trout of Trout Cacheris & Solomon helped secure an agreement for his client, Hope Hicks, to testify behind closed doors as part of the pre-impeachment investigation. "The courtly, white-haired Trout was an old friend and mentor of mine. A straight shooter, he thought little of the concept of absolute immunity and was willing to produce his client. In exchange, he wanted a closed-door hearing. No TV cameras," the book states.

And Eisen highlighted his connections to members of Trump's defense team during the impeachment trial. He writes of one heated exchange between Nadler and White House counsel Pat Cipollone: "Pat was a protégé and partner of one of the D.C. trial lawyers I admired most, Jake Stein. Stein's adage was never to lie in court; once you lose your reputation, you can never get it back. Pat's irate counterattack flew in the face of that lesson."

Those ties to Trump team members were amplified even more by the presence of Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz on the defense team. "I had worked for Dersh in law school—my first legal job. Starr had also been kind to me when I was a young lawyer and gofer on the Clinton impeachment," Eisen writes. "Both had visited me in Prague; by coincidence, Dersh had stayed with us at the same time as Barry, who also had him as a professor."

Eisen even used his relationship with Mueller to play the special counsel in preparation for his testimony. But that friendship didn't seem to do much to warm Mueller up to testifying. Eisen writes that when he greeted Mueller before the hearing: "He had bags under his eyes and appeared more gaunt than I had ever seen him. He said, with hollow eyes, 'Norm, I'd rather be anywhere else.' I didn't know how to respond."