As House Democrats launch impeachment investigations into President Trump, their party’s presidential candidates are squabbling over who had the idea first.
Four candidates are claiming the mantle of the first to take a risky but noble stance on removing the 45th president from the White House.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren received ample media attention when she came out in support of impeachment proceedings on April 19, shortly after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller examined instances in which Trump may have obstructed the investigation, but he did not make a determination on the charge due to longstanding Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime.
“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 said.
Following reports of a whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden, Warren highlighted her early support for impeachment at the beginning of her speech at the Polk Democratic County Steak Fry in Iowa.
“I read all 448 pages” of the Mueller report, Warren said last weekend, “and when I got to the end, I called for the impeachment of Donald Trump.”
But former Housing Secretary Julián Castro’s team says he was the first to support impeachment. “Five months ago @JulianCastro became the first 2020 candidate to call for impeachment. Today a formal inquiry was announced,” Castro spokesman Sawyer Hackett tweeted last week. “Also the first to call for AG William Barr’s impeachment,” he added in a subsequent tweet.
An hour after Warren’s April 19 series of tweets calling for impeachment, Castro shared a clip from a CNN appearance earlier that day. “Earlier today, I told @AC360 that I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Congress to open up impeachment hearings against President Trump. Robert Mueller clearly left that option in the hands of Congress.”
Beto O’Rourke shared video clips last Tuesday dating his support for impeachment to more than two years ago.
“If you’re asking me whether I would vote to impeach this president, the answer is yes,” O’Rourke said in a clip dated Aug. 21, 2017. “For more than two years, even as I was running for Senate in Texas, I have been clear that I support impeachment,” O’Rourke said in a statement released Tuesday.
The former Texas congressman, however, twice voted against opening impeachment proceedings, and in the early months of his presidential campaign said that he would leave the decision up to House members still serving in Congress. O’Rourke became more outspoken in his support for impeachment in early May.
Billionaire businessman Tom Steyer may have one of the strongest claims to early support for impeachment. Steyer founded the super PAC Need to Impeach in October 2017, and it has spent more than $26 million on its campaign to impeach Trump, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“People in Congress and his own administration know this president is a clear and present danger, who’s mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons,” Steyer said in a Need to Impeach launch video that month.
