House Democrats to Senate: Impeach Trump for Criticizing Impeachment on Twitter

House Democrats claimed Friday afternoon in President Donald Trump’s Senate trial that his comments on Twitter, in press conferences, and at campaign rallies criticizing the impeachment inquiry were impeachable “obstruction.”

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), opened the impeachment managers’ case on the second article of impeachment, for “obstruction of Congress,” noting that the president had told reporters that “there should be a way of stopping it, maybe legally, through the courts.”

She played a clip of him saying that, then continued:

Soon after, President Trump took the matters into his own hands. The president used his authority, and his office, to wage a relentless and misleading public campaign to attack the impeachment inquiry. The president spent time at rallies, at press conferences, and on Twitter, trying to persuade the American people that the House’s inquiry was invalid and fraudulent. Here are just a few of the President Trump’s comments about the impeachment inquiry. He called it a “witch hunt”; a “coup”; an “unconstitutional power grab”; a “fraud against the American people.” He said, “It’s the phony impeachment scam”; “the phony impeachment hoax”; “the Ukraine hoax”; and “a continuation of the greatest scam and witch hunt in the history of our country.” And those are probably some of the ones I can repeat here. And it didn’t stop.

Though Trump had said “legally, through the courts,” Garcia claimed that Trump’s rhetoric soon became “obstruction of Congress” because he did not submit to demands by the House — and instead criticized what the House was doing.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.