Democrat Rep. Al Green (TX) admitted this week that the Democrats’ efforts to impeach President Donald Trump began all the way back when he was campaigning to become president.
Green, who has been at the forefront of Democrats’ attempts to impeach Trump, made the revelation during an MSNBC interview on Monday.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes began by saying, “You just mentioned political expediency and insincerity — those are two charges that have been leveled against Democrats during this entire affair, particularly since September when the formal impeachment inquiry started, and you play a starring role in those charges.”
“I mean, the argument goes like this of House Republicans and Trump and his allies: basically the Democrats wanted to impeach Donald Trump from day one, they cast about looking for a set of facts that they could plausibly use to do it, and all of it was pretextual and reverse-engineered to get to this point, and Exhibit One: Congressman Al Green, who [has] been calling for the man’s impeachment for two years now,” Hayes said. “What’s your response to that charge?”
“Well, the genesis of impeachment, to be very candid with you, was when the president was running for office,” Green responded. “With those things in mind and with the president’s behavior before us, firing Mr. Comey who was investigating the intrusion of Russia into his campaign, our election, that was something that was not to be tolerated. And the president has continued to try to thwart the efforts of Congress to investigate with Mr. Mueller. The president, by and through his White House counsel, tried to get this done again to deal with Mr. Mueller to extricate him, to remove him from the process.”
“More specifically, I said that the president would claim that he was exonerated if there were impeachable actions that he performed and we did not move to perform our duty to impeach him,” Green added. “He has distorted the truth. He has twisted it and tried to crush it to earth.”
WATCH:
Democrat Rep. Al Green: “The genesis of impeachment…was when the president was running for office.” #StopTheMadnesspic.twitter.com/2n7oX8bozX
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 31, 2019
Green has already suggested that he has no interest in trying to work with the administration to achieve anything for the American people because he is already thinking about impeaching Trump again in the future if Trump wins re-election.
“A president can be impeached more than once,” Green told C-SPAN last month. “So, we can do this, we can move forward with what we have on the table currently, we can take this before the Senate and we can still investigate other issues and when the president has committed additional offenses, and my suspicion is that he will, we can take those before the Senate.”
“There is no limit on the number of times the Senate can vote to convict or not a president, no limit to the number of times the House can vote to impeach or not a president,” Green continued. “So, my belief is that the speaker will probably say we’re going to move forward with what we have now, but we’re not going to end investigations and that there may be possible opportunities to do other things at a later time.”
In a separate MSNBC interview last month, Green suggested that Trump needed to be impeached “to deal with slavery.”
“I do believe, ma’am, that we have to deal with the original sin,” Green continued. “We have to deal with slavery. Slavery was the thing that put all of what President Trump has done lately into motion. It’s insidious … racism, the president has played on racism and he’s used that as a weapon to galvanize a base of support to mobilize people.”