Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said if he were a U.S. senator, he would vote to convict and remove President Trump from office.
Bloomberg, 77, is running for the Democratic nomination for president to unseat Trump in the 2020 election.
“I was asked if I were a senator, how would I vote? And I’d have to swallow two or three times, but I would say I would vote to convict because there’s just so much evidence that he acted inappropriately,” Bloomberg said in an NBC interview.
Bloomberg prefaced his comments by saying such an action would be difficult for him to take, predicting that it may put the Democratic Party at a long-term disadvantage.
“I think that impeachment is a political process. It’s not good. We’d be much better off letting the voters decide who is president in this country,” Bloomberg told NBC. “But the president’s actions eventually, as information came out, it convinced me that he should be impeached and that this should be a fair trial.”
In December, the House of Representatives voted primarily along party lines to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. No Republican voted in favor of impeachment. Last Thursday, the House presented those articles of impeachment to the Senate.
The president’s lawyers have argued that neither of the charges is impeachable.
“Abuse of power, even if proved, is not an impeachable offense,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who is part of the president’s impeachment legal team. “That’s exactly what the framers rejected. They didn’t want to give Congress the authority to remove a president because he abused his power. They have to prove treason, they have to prove bribery, or they have to prove other crimes and misdemeanors.”
