Adam Schiff: ‘There Doesn’t Need to Be a Quid Pro Quo’ to Impeach Trump

On Sunday’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued there did not have to be a “quid pro quo” to impeach President Donald Trump.

Schiff said, “Well, we’re keeping our focus right now on the president’s coercion of an ally, that is Ukraine, to create this sham investigations into his political opponent. We have discovered in very short order not only the contents of that call but also the preparatory work that went into that call. The effort to condition something the Ukrainian president deeply sought, that is, a meeting with the president, to establish this new president to the Ukraine had a powerful patron in the United States that was vital importance to Ukraine, that was being conditioned as digging up dirt on the Bidens.”

He added, “There doesn’t need to be a quid pro quo. But it is clear already from the text messaged that this meeting that the Ukraine president sought was being conditioned on their willingness to interfere in the U.S. to help the president. That is a terrible abuse of the president’s power. Whether that abuse goes further, that is the withholding of military aid as leverage. There is certainly strong indication that’s is true as well. We will get to the bottom of it. Here you have a president of the United States abusing his power to the detriment of our national security. And doing so yet to get another foreign country to intervene in our election. It’s hard to imagine more of a corruption of the office than that.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN