‘It’s a classic mob shakedown!’ House Intel Committee chair Adam Schiff accuses Donald Trump of acting like the MAFIA in his call to Ukraine’s leader
- House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said the rough transcript of Donald Trump’s call to Ukraine’s president was damning
- He said it is ‘quintessentially what the framers were concerned about’ when they created a pathway for impeachment
- ‘The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined,’ he said at a news conference.
- He told reporters, ‘What those notes reflect is a classic, mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader’
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Wednesday that the pressure Donald Trump put Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden is ‘is quintessentially what the framers were concerned about’ when they created a pathway for impeachment.
Schiff said prior to the White House’s release of a transcript of the July call it thought would clear the president that Trump had ‘cross the Rubicon’ of appropriate behavior with the conversation in which he asked the foreign government to probe his political rival.
‘The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined. It is shocking at another level that the White House would release these notes and felt that somehow this would help the president’s case or cause. Because what those notes reflect is a classic, mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader,’ he said.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Wednesday that the pressure Donald Trump put Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden is ‘is quintessentially what the framers were concerned about’ when they created a pathway for impeachment
‘They reflect a Ukrainian president who was desperate for US support, for military support to help that country in a hot war with Putin’s Russia,’ he contended. ‘And at the same time a President of the United States, who immediately after the Ukraine president expresses a need for further weapons, tells the Ukraine president that he has a favor to ask.’
Reading the president’s words aloud, the California Democrat said, ‘This is how a mafia boss talks.’
Attorney General William Barr has denied any involvement in the Biden-Ukraine probe that Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is spearheading.
‘But nonetheless you can see what the Department of Justice would want this transcript to never see the light of day,’ said Schiff at his press conference.
Schiff said that Trump’s repeated references to the attorney general were intended to signal that he’d use internal force if necessary to get what he wanted, regardless of whether he followed through.
He said Trump’s refusal to release nearly $350 in military aid to Ukraine after
‘I think we know why the aid was being withheld,’ he said of the money, dismissing Trump’s explanations. ‘But regardless, Ukraine understood exactly what was being asked of it.’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday that the caucus is launching an ‘formal impeachment inquiry’ into the president that Schiff says he supports.
‘I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here. I think what we have learned, what has been admitted and now what we’ve seen in writing is about as damning as you can imagine,’ he said of the impeachment investigation at his press conference. ‘No one should have any illusions about the seriousness of what is already uncontested.’
Schiff said that Trump’s repeated references to the attorney general were intended to signal that he’d use internal force if necessary to get what he wanted
Echoing Pelosi’s arguments a day prior, he said that the President of the United States has ‘betrayed his Oath of Office’ and undermined American national security.
‘And that I think is quintessentially what the framers were concerned about. I think that is quintessentially what the framers thought was the sum and substance of what might warrant a president’s removal from office,’ he stated. ‘I don’t want to understate the significance of what’s already been revealed.’