Democratic Party presidential hopeful and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Sunday that in asking the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, President Donald Trump had committed an act on par with the Watergate scandal.
Klobuchar made the comments on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos in which she reiterated her stance that the president’s actions were worthy of his impeachment.
Then Klobuchar evoked Watergate, the 1972 scandal that would force President Richard Nixon to resign from the Oval Office.
“When you think back to Watergate, they didn’t close their eyes when a paranoid president, who was up for election and looking for dirt on a political opponent, got involved with having people break into an office and steal information on their opponents from a filing cabinet,” Klobuchar said to moderator George Stephanopoulos.
“Well, this is the global version of Watergate where a president is trying to get dirt on a political opponent from a world leader,” she added.
The Minnesota lawmaker’s comments come following the second week of open hearings in the House impeachment inquiry, announced by House Democrats in September following news of the president’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which President Trump asked Zelensky to investigate theories relating to the 2016 election and into former Vice President Joe Biden, one of his political rivals.
Klobuchar isn’t the only one who has recently drawn a comparison between the president’s current predicament and that of the 37th president. As The Inquisitr reported earlier this week, Nick Akerman, a former U.S. Attorney known for prosecuting the Watergate case, said that the recent testimony of U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was particularly damming to the president, calling his testimony earlier this week a “tipping point.”
We need to not just win & eke by victory at 4 in the morning on election night — we need to win big. I’ve won every race, every place, every time by bringing Democrats, Independents & moderate Republicans w/ me. It’s how I’m running this campaign & how I’ll govern as President. pic.twitter.com/7tbYzbXSVW
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) November 22, 2019
“There’s no defense to any of it now, there’s nothing. What’s he going to say, the Devil made me do it? That’s what they’re left with. There’s no good defense. There’s no good reason why he did this. It’s purely for personal campaign purposes,” Akerman said.
Per data from polling aggregate RealClearPolitics, Klobuchar – viewed as a moderate candidate among the Democrat’s still-crowded field of candidates – is currently polling in eighth place with 1.5 percent of support among potential primary voters. The race is currently lead by Biden – another moderate candidate – who has a 10.5 point lead over the party’s second-place candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and an 11.3 point lead over the third-place candidate Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Witnesses over the past two weeks have publicly testified about the president’s policy toward Ukraine, which involved him asking for the investigations into the election and to Biden around the same time he reportedly ordered already-approved funding to the country to be held.