The walls keep closing in around the Trump team, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation concluded. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — who’s also a presidential candidate — has now come out in support of impeaching President Donald Trump in light of what’s revealed in the redacted version of Mueller’s final report made available this week.
Citing the report’s outline of condemning evidence against the Trump team even in the absence of any prosecutable charges against the president, Warren insisted on Twitter:
‘To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in similar ways. The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings.’
In other words — Warren’s not messing around. She’s one of the first nationally prominent Democrats to call for impeachment against the president, and some suggest that her call could herald similar ones from other presidential candidates in coming days. She’d previously said that she’d be waiting for the Mueller report to make her final decision on the matter and well, that time has come.
An aide told CNN that Warren “began reading the redacted Mueller report on the plane” and “continued reading into the night after getting home” to Massachusetts from a campaign event in Utah. They add, in the description of reporter MJ Lee:
‘When she was finished, [she] felt it was her “duty” [to] publicly say what she just tweeted.’
Lee also shared that Warren’s camp does not intend to make impeaching Trump a key campaign platform going forward, but the Senator instead “plans to keep rolling out major policy proposals.” Although her presidential bid has attracted less airtime than others, she has distinguished herself in a crowded field by ambitious policy proposals. Besides support for broad Democratic efforts like the anti-corruption “For the People Act,” she has also proposed measures like “a new era of strong antitrust enforcement so big corporations can’t stifle competition” and an asset tax targeting the ultra-rich that together would remove some of the burden off America’s lower income people. On her campaign website, she says newly raised money could be used for “universal childcare, student loan debt relief, and down payments on a Green New Deal and Medicare for all.”
She’s not entirely alone on the national stage in newly calling for Trump’s impeachment. Prominent progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) did the same this week following the release of the Mueller report, saying she’d sign onto a resolution for impeachment previously introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) — who’s hardly a nobody — said just this week he too “may very well” want to move forward with articles of impeachment.
Although impeachment likely wouldn’t pass both chambers since there’s a Republican majority in the Senate, the Democrat-majority House could still send a strong message of intolerance for the president’s incessant corruption anyway. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has not indicated she’s keen on moving forward with the idea.
Check out Twitter’s reaction to Warren floating the idea below…
Featured Image via screenshot
