Andrew Card, who served as White House chief of staff during the George W. Bush administration, on Monday expressed support for House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry of President Trump, saying that “clearly lines have been crossed.”
“I do think an impeachment inquiry is warranted,” Card, who led Bush’s White House team between 2001 and 2006, said on MSNBC while addressing revelations about Trump’s alleged efforts to enlist Ukraine’s help in his 2020 reelection campaign.
{mosads}Card cautioned that he wasn’t sure if Trump’s actions qualified as an “impeachable offense” and implored members of Congress to let the investigation play out before reaching a conclusion on the matter.
“Most people in Congress have already made up their mind when they haven’t seen any evidence. I want people to calm down, take a look at it,” he argued. “Don’t call a molehill a mountain. They tend to do that. There’s hyperbole on both sides. This is a serious process.”
“I do want the impeachment process if it’s going to go forward to be done deliberately without hyperbole, without exaggeration, based on the facts,” he added.
A wave of revelations regarding Trump’s interactions with Ukraine prompted Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last month to shift her long-held position and launch a formal impeachment inquiry into the president.
A whistleblower complaint filed within the intelligence community is at the center of the probe. The complaint, among other things, accuses Trump of carrying out a broad effort to use “the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign government in the 2020 U.S. election.”
A White House memo of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed several key components of the complaint. During the call, Trump asked Zelensky to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to investigate 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden over unfounded allegations of corruption.
Trump and GOP lawmakers have dismissed charges of wrongdoing on the part of the president, suggesting that the impeachment inquiry stems from Democrats’ regrets about the 2016 election.
“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP,” Trump, who has repeatedly lashed out at Democrats over the probe, tweeted last week.