Trump To Schiff: You Can’t Impeach Me, I’ll Impeach You! And Sue You!
On Saturday, President Donald Trump appeared before a crowd at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. and let loose at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff.
“Maybe we should just impeach them, because they’re lying and what they’re doing is a terrible thing for our country,” Trump said, according to CNN. It’s an instance of wanting to fight fire with fire.
Schiff and Pelosi are leading an impeachment inquiry on the president, who is suspected of pressuring Ukraine to investigate his Democratic opponent — former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The problem for Trump here is that members of Congress cannot be impeached, according to the Constitution.
Maybe that’s why, in the same speech, Trump threatened to sue Schiff.
“[E]ven if we lose, the American public will understand,” Trump said, adding that Pelosi should also be sued. He didn’t specify what exactly this legal action would look like.
A day before threatening to sue and impeach Pelosi and Schiff, Trump gave remarks at a campaign rally in Louisiana, according to Real Clear Politics, where he called Schiff out for paraphrasing his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Trump’s speech, he referred to the Democratic Congressman as “Shifty Schiff.”
Trump has used this nickname in the past, drawing censure from critics, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who believe the epithet to be anti-Semitic.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO