Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld claimed removing President Trump from office “could be a valuable precedent” for the Senate to set.
Weld, who is challenging Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, told Yahoo Finance on Monday that he hopes the president will be removed from office by the end of the primary so that he faces off against Vice President Mike Pence instead.
House Democrats launched an impeachment investigation into President Trump last month over his calls with Ukrainian leadership. Although they could have enough votes to pass articles of impeachment, Senate Republicans have shown little interest in voting to remove the president from the White House.
Weld hoped that would change and claimed Senate Republicans need to step in to stop Trump from “buying the election.”
“I hope the Republicans are going to remove this guy,” Weld said. “That’s our insurance policy, among other things, against him spending a billion dollars on Facebook ads and essentially buying the election.”
[Read more: ‘The Three Stooges’: Trump takes aim at GOP primary challengers Sanford, Weld, and Walsh]
Highlight: “I hope the Republicans are going to remove this guy,” @GovBillWeld says about Trump. “It could be a valuable precedent against the day when we might have another Nero or dictator come along and try to take away our liberties as a country.” https://t.co/Jb7k9twFHf pic.twitter.com/fzy1OdLb2W
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) October 28, 2019
He also claimed he didn’t think it would be a “bad precedent” to have Trump removed because he believes the president is a dictator.
“It could be a valuable precedent against the day when we might have another Nero or dictator come along and try to take away our liberties as a country,” Weld explained.
Weld has made comparing Trump to a dictator part of his long-shot campaign. In September, he said that Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian leaders was treasonous and warranted the death penalty.
“Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election, it couldn’t be clearer, and that’s not just undermining democratic institutions,” he said. “That is treason. It’s treason, pure and simple. And the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death. That’s the only penalty.”
Before his current presidential bid, Weld was governor of Massachusetts. He also ran for vice president in 2016 on the Libertarian Party’s ticket with Gary Johnson.
