Julián Castro Accuses Donald Trump Of ‘Flagrantly’ Violating Law, Calls On Democrats To ‘Do Something’

Julián Castro, a former Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Barack Obama and currently a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, slammed President Donald Trump on Friday in the wake of the whistleblower controversy involving an alleged favor asked of the Ukrainian president.

While on the campaign trail, Castro accused Trump of setting a bad standard for American citizens before calling on House Democrats to take appropriate measures to impeach the president.

“You cannot sit by as the highest officeholder in the land flagrantly violates the law and violates every norm of a healthy democracy that we have, because it’s setting a terrible standard for people in the future. We can never normalize this,” Castro said.

“He needs to be impeached. I love these House Democrats — my brother is one of them, but it’s time for them to do something. It’s time for them to act,” he added.

News of the developing controversy broke after a whistleblower claimed the president made a promise to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July while pressuring him to reveal dirt on former vice president Joe Biden, his primary political opponent for the 2020 election.

The Hill reported that Republicans have indicated the dirt may have centered around an attempt by Biden in 2016 to remove a prosecutor from investigating a natural gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a board member of that company.

Castro’s call for impeachment echoes similar statements from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also called for Trump’s impeachment while blasting Congress for not already doing so, as reported by The Inquisitr.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has resisted the growing number of urgent calls by top Democrats to begin impeachment proceedings, instead taking a more methodical approach to the matter in an effort to get it right. She also holds the fear that impeaching Trump without rock solid evidence would scare swing voters in the 2020 election.

But Warren didn’t hold back in a Friday tweet, accusing Congress of being “complicit” in Trump’s alleged collusion with foreign entities to influence U.S. elections and stating that it’s Congress’s duty to begin the impeachment process.

“Do your constitutional duty and impeach the president,” Warren wrote in the tweet.

During the second Democratic Presidential Debate, Castro argued then that Trump should be impeached, claiming the Robert Mueller report indicated that he clearly “deserves it,” according to Slate. He also argued that if Democrats fail to try impeaching Trump before the 2020 election, the president will claim they didn’t impeach him because he didn’t do anything wrong.