Democrat Al Green Admits His Party Was Out to Impeach Trump ‘When He Was Running for Office’

One of the most outspoken pro-impeachment Democrats in Washington now says the “genesis” of Donald Trump‘s impeachment began long before the controversial phone call with Ukraine’s president.

On Monday, early supporter of impeachment and Democratic Congressman Al Green appeared on MSNBC, where host Chris Hayes said, “Political expediency and insincerity — those are two charges that have been leveled against Democrats during this entire affair, particularly since September when the formal impeachment inquiry started, and you play a starring role in those charges.”

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Hayes continued, “The argument goes like this of House Republicans and Trump and his allies: the Democrats wanted to impeach Donald Trump from day one, they cast about looking for a set of facts that they could plausibly use to do it, and all of it was pretextual and reverse-engineered to get to this point, and Exhibit One: Congressman Al Green, who [has] been calling for the man’s impeachment for two years now.”

“What’s your response to that charge?” Hayes asked.

Green didn’t deny it.

‘The genesis of impeachment…was when the president was running for office’

“Well, the genesis of impeachment, to be very candid with you, was when the president was running for office and he had members of his own party to talk about his unfitness to hold office,” Green admitted to Hayes, later citing things said by Republican Senators Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham from the 2016 election. “So the president didn’t have the luxury of persons from his party having been on his side as it were throughout this entire ordeal.”

Green continued, “With those things in mind and with the president’s behavior before us, firing Mr. Comey who was investigating the intrusion of Russia into his campaign, our election — that was something that was not to be tolerated. And the president has continued to try to thwart the efforts of Congress to investigate with Mr. Mueller.”

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‘He has distorted the truth’

“More specifically, I said that the president would claim that he was exonerated if there were impeachable actions that he performed and we did not move to perform our duty to impeach him” Green added.

“He has distorted the truth,” Green claimed. “He has twisted it and tried to crush it to earth.”