House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) says Donald Trump “ordered” House Republicans to try to impeach President Joe Biden not just as a revenge tactic for his own two impeachments, but as a political strategy to hobble Biden going into the 2024 election.
Characterizing the twice-impeached Trump — who faces 91 felony charges in four separate cases — as a “living breathing one-person crime wave,” Jeffries excoriated his GOP colleagues for their fealty to the unelected leader, who he portrayed as calling the shots from Mar-a-Lago.
When the impeachment inquiry was formalized yesterday by the entire House Republican conference — in a 221-212 vote — Jeffries evoked the mafia to describe what had happened, saying “the extreme MAGA Republicans in the House were ordered by an organized crime boss…a former President of the United States…to launch this illegitimate impeachment inquiry as a political hit on President Joe Biden.”
[In September Trump tacitly acknowledged that the GOP’s efforts to impeach Biden were about revenge: “I think had they not done it to me — and I’m very popular, they like me and I like them, the Republican Party — perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”]
Leader Jeffries: Trump ordered the extreme MAGA Republicans to launch this illegitimate impeachment inquiry as a political hit on President Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/7SrQ6Ae2Qa
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 14, 2023
Congressman Jeffries doesn’t think Trump is the only crime boss getting help from U.S. Republicans either, as he ripped his GOP colleagues for containing a “pro-Putin caucus” that, in denying critical aid to Ukraine, helps Putin annex parts of that besieged country for Russia.
Even prominent Republicans back Jeffries’s thinking here, with powerful Senate legislators like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) willing to consider — as House Republicans demand — U.S.-Mexico border funding as a condition of Ukraine aid, but who are not willing to forsake Ukraine and encourage Putin’s forces on the edge of Europe.
On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Romney called Putin a thug and a murderer, characteristics of crime bosses: “Well, we’re not going to write a blank check [to Ukraine]. We’re going to evaluate exactly how the money is spent. What we’re going to do is provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to defend themselves against a brutal invasion by Putin, who is a thug and a murderer. So, that’s what we’re going to do.”
