On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Newsroom,” former Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) said after a press briefing in which Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said the Trump administration withheld $400 million in military aid to Ukraine until the DNC server and the 2016 campaign was investigated, President Donald Trump should be impeached.
Mulvaney later released a statement saying, “There was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election.”
Kasich said, “This has been a very difficult 24 hours for me. The issue of impeachment is really big to me, and when I heard what Mulvaney said, the chief of staff to the president, it pushed me really across the rubicon. I’ll tell you why. Withholding military aid, vital military aid to a nation like Ukraine which has Russian troops inside its territory, that’s threatened all the time, that withholding it so that a political operation can take place, investigate this thing around the server. We’re going to withhold the aid until do you that. To me, it’s totally inappropriate. It’s an abuse of power. Now, I know that there are presidents that will withhold aid because they have policy differences but this is not a policy difference. And so my view is that — look, I fought with people on the air about is there a quid pro quo, and business rise to the level of impeachment. Now I believe it does and I say it with great sadness. This is not something I really wanted to do. I mean, I voted to impeach Bill Clinton and that was really hard and this has been excruciatingly hard but this behavior, in my opinion, cannot be tolerated and action has to be taken.”
He continued, “Should impeachment move forward and go for a full examination and trial of the United States senate? My vote would be yes and I don’t say it lightly. This is extremely difficult for me but I feel what I have to do, what my conscious tells me. You can’t operate like this and withhold vital military aid for somebody because you’re involved in some sort of a political examination or pressure on a foreign government to do this. It’s inappropriate.”
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