It hasn’t been long since it was revealed that Donald Trump reportedly pressured the president of Ukraine to help him smear leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden, as reported by The Inquisitr . Now, another top 2020 Democratic candidate, Elizabeth Warren, not only stepped her call for Trump’s impeachment, she lashed out at Congress for failing to impeach the president by this point in his term.
Warren became the first leading lawmaker in her party to call for Democrats in the House of Representatives led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to begin impeachment proceedings. On April 30, the senator took to her Twitter account to announce that she had completed her reading of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and possible obstruction of justice. This led her to conclude that the president “is the most corrupt president in our lifetime, and Congress should begin impeachment proceedings.”
Pelosi has consistently opposed opening impeachment proceedings against Trump. She did, however, tell National Public Radio on Friday that she would support a law that would allow Trump or any sitting president to face criminal indictment.
According to NPR , Pelosi continues to fear that moving ahead with impeachment would “alienate swing voters.” She told the radio network that Congress will follow “the facts and the law,” without specifying at which point the facts and law would trigger impeachment proceedings.
But in a Twitter post on Friday, Warren wasn’t buying Pelosi’s logic.
“After the Mueller report, Congress had a duty to begin impeachment. By failing to act, Congress is complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in US elections,” Warren wrote. “Do your constitutional duty and impeach the president.”
Warren went on to state that Trump “continues to commit crimes” in part because he knows that Congress will do nothing to stop him. She then recalled the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal in 1974, which were aborted when Nixon simply resigned rather than face impeachment.
As the senator recalled, Democrats and Republicans were “united in support of impeachment” not because they both disliked Nixon, but because at that time, both political parties “refused to be complicit in future law-breaking by Nixon or other presidents.”
Warren concluded by writing, “It’s time for this Congress to step up and act.”
Writing for Slate.com , national security expert Fred Kaplan said that Trump’s reported attempts to force Ukraine to investigate Biden over his alleged role in the dismissal of a prosecutor there — apparently by withholding promised military aid — “clearly amounts to bribery, under federal statute.”
In the United States Constitution, bribery is singled out specifically as an impeachable offense by a president or other government official.
