Appearing Thursday on the Fox Business Channel’s Making Money, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) ripped Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) for criticizing President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by comparing him to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Asked about Romney’s remarks, Scott said his colleague was behaving like Nancy Pelosi and the rest of her Democrat caucus and affirmed the Utah lawmaker’s staunch anti-Trump views don’t represent the official line of Senate Republicans.
“Senator Romney has gone down the same path as the Democrats like Nancy Pelosi,” Scott told Fox Business Channel’s Making Money host Charles Payne. “He thinks the worst of the president instead of the best, before he ever gets all the facts.”
“We have to go through the process to get the facts,” added the Florida lawmaker. “Senator Romney doesn’t speak for the Republican Party. He can have his own opinions, and he doesn’t speak for all Republican senators.”
Romney, who harbors the staunchest anti-Trump views among Republican senators, referred to the world leaders’ discussion as “troubling to the extreme” and said he supports further inquiry into the matter.
“My reaction was the same as (the one) I had a few days ago, which is — this remains deeply troubling,” Romney said during a Wednesday interview at The Atlantic Festival. “We’ll see where it leads, but the first reaction is troubling.”
Never Trumper Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) echoed Romney’s remarks regarding the call, saying: “This [is] going to take a long time but there’s obviously some very troubling things here.”
“There are real troubling things here. Republicans ought not just circle the wagons and Democrats ought not be using words like ‘impeach’ before they knew anything about the actual substance,” he added.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that details of the call were brought forward in the form of a complaint by a CIA officer. The Department of Justice on Wednesday confirmed the Office of Intelligence Community Inspector General found that the so-called “whistleblower” not only possessed second-hand information regarding the call, but also had a “political bias” in favor of a “political rival” of President Trump.
The transcript of the July 25th phone call, released by the White House on Wednesday, shows President Trump and Zelensky discussing, separately, both U.S. military aid to Ukraine and possible wrongdoings by the Biden family in the eastern European country. While President Trump suggested Zelensky look into the Bidens, the Ukrainian president told reporters at the United Nations that he felt no pressure to look into the former second family.
“I think you read everything. I think you read text. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open elections, elections of USA. No, sure, we had I think good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things, and I — so I think and you read it that nobody pushed me,” Zelensky said.
Nonetheless, following the transcript’s release, Pelosi reaffirmed her support for a formal impeachment probe, claiming that the president used “taxpayer money to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.”
Republican panel members, including Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA), took turns blasting House Democrats for blowing the complaint widely out of proportion to damage the Trump administration and the president’s re-election chances.
“I want to congratulate the Democrats on the rollout of their latest information warfare operation against the president, and their extraordinary ability once again to enlist the mainstream media in their campaign,” said Nunes, adding, “we’ve been treated to an unending parade of press releases, press conferences, and fake news stories.”
Despite Democrats racing to impeach him, President Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill say they aren’t worried whatsoever about the latest developments — instead — they believe their opponents have overplayed their hand and help boost the Republican in 2020.
“The left has officially lost their minds — they are so fixated on their imaginary impeachment that they are getting nothing else done,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Breitbart News. “266 days in power and what have Nancy Pelosi and the Socialist Democrats accomplished? Absolutely nothing.”