Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Chairwoman, on Monday insisted that Democrats had not been unfair to President Donald Trump when they pushed Russia collusion hoax for the last two years.
CNN’s Jim Sciutto asked Bass: “Did Democrats, in your view, unfairly hang that allegation over his head without evidence sufficient to support it?”
“No, I don’t believe we did that at all,” Bass said a day after Attorney General William Barr revealed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated” with the Russians.
Bass insisted that Democrats who incessantly pushed the collusion conspiracies without any evidence were being fair even though one of the CBC’s most prominent members, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), in 2017 even guaranteed that Trump colluded with the Russians.
“Here you have a president who I can tell you and guarantee you is in collusion with the Russians to undermine our democracy. Here you have a president that has obstructed justice. And here you have a president that lies every day,” Waters reportedly said at a CBC town hall event in 2017. “How many of you in your organizations have said ‘Impeach 45? … Well, they don’t have what it takes, they don’t have the laws yet. Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is… There is no law that can dictate impeachment. What the Constitution says is ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ and we define that. Bill Clinton got impeached because he lied.”
Bass insisted that Congress needs to see the full Mueller report and “underlying evidence” behind it and accused Barr for auditioning to be Trump’s attorney general when he wrote a memo to the White House in which he explained that there was “no basis for obstruction of justice.”
“So one absolutely has to weigh his credibility in that matter as well. He seemed as though he was clearly auditioning for a job. He got the job. And he comes up with the same opinion,” Bass said of Barr.
Bass also said there are plenty of other issues Democrats will look at in the coming months besides Russia collusion.
“There is the obstruction of justice. There’s conflict of interest. There’s corruption. There’s a variety of things that we do need to investigate and provide oversight for,” she said. “You have to remember that, for the last two years, when the Republicans were in charge, they basically provided no oversight of this administration. And that is our constitutional duty.”
When Sciutto asked whether Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Intelligence Committee Chair who claimed he had seen “significant evidence of collusion,” should “release that evidence to back up that allegation, despite what the special counsel has now found,” Bass punted, saying that she could not speak on the matter because “a lot of what happens in that committee happens in a classified setting.”
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