Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Sunday said she supports impeaching President Donald Trump.
In an interview on Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast, Ocasio-Cortez said of Trump: “I think you could reach in a bag and pull so many things out that are impeachable of this President.”
“I support impeaching this President,” she said.
It’s not the first time Ocasio-Cortez has said as much. In June of last year, ahead of her November election victory, Ocasio-Cortez said she would support impeaching Trump. “We have the grounds to do it,” she said.
In March, she said that she “had been clear” about how she would vote on an impeachment resolution, but that she would “defer to party leadership” regarding an actual impeachment vote. She said later in March that “I think what’s tough is impeachment is something that I openly support, but it’s also just the reality of having votes in the Senate to pursue that.”
Asked Sunday about fellow freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D-MI) resolution to begin an impeachment investigation, which was also released in late March, Ocasio-Cortez said that while “we hadn’t signed on when it was first introduced, but we probably will.”
“There’s just so many things,” she said.
Tlaib famously said shortly after being sworn in as a congresswoman that “we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” In late March, she introduced a resolution to begin to do just that, which would initiate an investigation into whether Trump had committed impeachable offenses.
Asked for her “top three” of Trump’s supposedly impeachable offenses, Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday cited Trump’s alleged violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause — “I think it’s always been about that, for me” — tax fraud, and then the recent reports that Trump told Customs and Border Protection Commissioner (now acting DHS secretary) Kevin McAleenan that he would pardon him if McAleenan was found to have broken the law on Trump’s behalf. (Trump has denied the reports.) “
Much of the investigation into alleged Russian election meddling and related matters, Ocasio-Cortez said, “comes down to Emoluments.”
“It comes down to money,” she said. “If we had gotten something from the Mueller report, then I would probably put that up there as number one, but I feel like it’s a little risky to put the entire grounds of impeachment– to put all your eggs in that basket, when I think that a lot of this stuff happens through back door bank accounts and stuff like that.”
An impeachment on Emoluments Clause grounds, she said, would “include any financial misconduct in relation to Russia.”
