Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney compared life under impeachment to an acrimonious divorce, shortly after the Democrats announced they would bring two articles of impeachment against President Trump.
“People ask me all the time, ‘How are you doing? How are you handling this?'” Mulvaney said at the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council meeting. “This is what it’s like; this is how I’m handling it. I want you to imagine going through the worst possible divorce … and then your spouse gets to go on TV every single day and give his or her side of the thing, and you have to sit home and watch it on TV and take it,” he said. “It is extraordinarily frustrating.”
“Part of me really wants to,” Mulvaney said about the prospect of giving testimony during the investigation, calling his time testifying on Capitol Hill for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “some of the most fun I’ve ever had on the Hill.”
However, it would be foolish, Mulvaney suggested, to testify before the committees without a lawyer and in a process he decried several times as politically-motivated. “Sixteen members of the House Judiciary panel had already voted in favor of impeachment before this process started,” Mulvaney said, in reference to a separate vote earlier this summer. “This is a political process, not a legal process. It’s not judicial.”
Mulvaney cited Judiciary Committee counsel Barry Berke’s remarks Monday, who as a witness refused to take questions, then moved to the dais and into the role of inquisitor, as one instance of the lapse in procedure evident in the hearings so far. “This is the Wild Wild West of process, and you can’t lend legitimacy to it by treating it like it is,” he added, describing the hearings as a “Kangaroo Court.”
“It’s wrong to equate this with the process in court of taking the Fifth, of giving evidence,” Mulvaney said. “This is a campaign.”
Ultimately, Mulvaney said he would defer to the president. “If you’re inside the White House, you do what the president tells you to do. It doesn’t bother me to do that.”
