President Donald Trump dismissed Thursday the idea he deserved impeachment, claiming he did not commit an impeachable offense unlike former presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong. Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time,” Trump said. “But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”
The president made his remarks in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
“Clinton was different. He was guilty,” Trump said. “This is a simpler case than his.”
Democrats believe Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure leaders to investigate Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, which was an impeachable defense.
But Trump said he had an obligation to examine corruption in Ukraine before giving them financial and military aid.
“We are giving them money, we are giving them weapons,” he said. “We have an obligation to look at corruption.”
Trump suggested that Democrats were overstepping their authority and were out of line with the public mood.
“I did nothing wrong, and for them to do this is a disgrace,” he said. “To me the word impeachment’s a very ugly word.”
Trump said that impeachment would only rally his political base.
“It’s energized my base like I’ve never seen before,” he said.
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