US Senator Elizabeth Warren on Friday became the first Democratic candidate for next year’s presidential election to make a full-throated call for the US House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against US President Donald Trump after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report.
Mueller, who investigated whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election and whether Trump tried to interfere with the inquiry, found no evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign and made no verdict on obstruction of justice.
However, Mueller found that Trump made numerous attempts to interfere with the investigation, but was largely foiled by those around him.
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Warren said on Twitter that it would be damaging to “ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior.”
“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 against the President of the United States,” Warren wrote.
Other Democratic presidential candidates, while supportive of the idea of impeachment, were more circumspect in their responses.
Former US secretary of housing and urban development Julian Castro on Friday told CNN that it would be “perfectly reasonable for [the US] Congress to open up those proceedings.”
Other Democratic candidates, including US Senator Cory Booker, said that it was too soon to initiate impeachment proceedings.
“We don’t have an unredacted version of the report. We don’t have the underlying materials that that report was written upon. We haven’t had yet an opportunity to have hearings where we interview Mueller,” Booker said on a campaign stop in Reno, Nevada.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said that the best recourse for Trump’s actions as president would be to vote him out.
“If we really want to send Trumpism into the history books, the best thing we can do is defeat it decisively at the ballot box in 2020,” Buttigieg said on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers.
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