On The Path To Impeachment
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | October 10, 2019
“President Trump keeps demonstrating to the American people just how patently unfit he is to be President of the United States.”
As President Trump engages in one of the most shameful acts in American history by abandoning the Kurds – our allies in the fight to eliminate ISIS – to be slaughtered by Turkey, support for impeachment of the President is rapidly growing.
The most dramatic evidence of this is the Fox News poll released yesterday which found 51 percent of voters supporting both impeaching Trump and removing him from office – a record high for a Fox poll. An additional 4 percent supported just impeaching Trump, bringing the total support for impeachment to 55 percent.
The turning point on impeachment came when a courageous whistleblower filed a complaint that told the story of Trump’s July 25 telephone call to the President of Ukraine. Trump pressured the Ukrainian President to investigate his possible presidential opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden’s son, and to investigate the debunked claim that the 2016 hacking of the DNC originated in Ukraine and not Russia.
The release of a summary of the call by Trump was nothing less than a confession by Trump of misusing his office for personal political gain. The summary also confirmed the accuracy of the whistleblower’s complaint.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued this week powerfully reaffirms the Mueller report findings that it was Russia that “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” According to the report, “The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign.”
President Trump has done nothing to prevent this foreign interference in our elections from happening again. And “Moscow Mitch” McConnell continues to be a chief enabler of future cyberattacks on our elections by blocking almost all legislative efforts, including bipartisan Senate bills, to strengthen the security of our elections against foreign interference in the 2020 election.
While President Trump continues to stonewall the impeachment investigation, making indefensible constitutional and legal claims to justify his position, the House is on an inexorable path to impeach Trump.
President Trump keeps demonstrating to the American people just how patently unfit he is to be President of the United States.
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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. See previous Notes from Fred here.
